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General discussion

Compaq and Vista??????

Oct 25, 2007 11:06PM PDT

Hi Everyone
I hope someone can help........ About 6 months ago I bought a Compaq Presario C500. It is Vista Basic......... It did not come with any discs only a Recovery programme which you download to dvd in case you need it.

I now want to clean my drive and return it to as it was when I bought the computer.

This does not seem possible...... The recovery disc only seems to return the computer to a previous state and does not repair any of the problems with the computer....

Any Ideas
Thanks Mike

Discussion is locked

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Compaq redo
Oct 25, 2007 11:33PM PDT

It would appear that you may be choosing the wrong option during the restore. I am not sure it would be the same but I have a Compaq laptop that I have restored with out any issues, there maybe an advanced tab or something to this effect to start the destructive restore and not just run repair on the current install. Most of the restore options do point mainly to just repair because people could inadvertently reformat and reinstall with out really wanting to.

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The PC Should Also Have a Recovery Partition
Oct 28, 2007 4:31AM PDT

It may not be necessary to use the Recovery Discs.. On this Compaq XP computer, you simply click on Start-All Programs-PC Help & Tools, then click on the "Compaq System Recovery"

Using the discs, you must start the computer, place the first disc in the DVD/CD drive, then shut down the computer. Upon restart, it should give you the option to perform a full destructive recovery.

Either way, as previously mentioned by the other respondent, you need to do a "Destructive Recovery" which will format the drive and reinstall everything back to factory condition.

Hope this helps.

Grif