Hey, y'all. I have a bit of a problem that I hope you can help me with:

I'm fairly proficient when it comes to computers. I know how to mess with programs, some HTML work, etc. I often get asked to fix people's laptops on a daily basis, which is where the problem began.



I've reverted computers back to factory settings many, many times. This time, however, I am running into a situation. This particular laptop is a 2008 HP running on Vista Home Premium that doesn't get used very often. I'd say it probably gets turned on once a month. Nothing much was installed on it except for Adobe Reader, iTunes, and a ton of Word documents. My mom wanted me to factory restore it so she could hand it off to someone else.

Anyway, to get to the point: I did the usual F11 when the computer booted up and ran through the prompt asking me if I would prefer to use System Restore to go back to an earlier time. I chose no and proceeded onto the screen asking if I would like to reinstate it to factory settings. I clicked yes and watched it go through the motions of installing original software. Everything was normal to that point, but after that, it gets weird. It came up with a screen saying "Installing HP Software" and gets all the way to 100% before restarting a few times and coming back to that screen. It stays there for what seems like ages, then restarts a few more times. Then it comes to a blank, black screen and restarts yet again. Finally, after that, it goes to the desktop for about a split second, displays what I think is an error message--it's honestly too quick for me to tell, all I see is Win32--before restarting a couple more times. It then loops the same sequence after that.

It's been doing this for the past twelve hours. Usually when I factory restore, it takes maybe two or three hours at the max. I tried stopping it and turning the computer on like normal, but I get a message saying that Windows is not installed. After that, I went and did another factory restore, without heeding any different result.

I am completely baffled. This has never happened before in the years that I've done this, so I don't know whether it's normal or not. To me, it doesn't seem so. I feel as if something's wrong with the OS or that the computer itself is glitching big time. Anyone else run into this problem and/or know how to fix it?

Thank you heaps!

Suggestion only :

Call your HP manufacturer and ask for a set of recovery disks. The charge is minimal.


How to restore an HP Computer to Factory Settings
http://www.ehow.com/how_4479537_restore-hp-computer-factory-settings.html