System Recovery taking 20+ hours

Hello all,

Restoring factory defaults on my HP laptop from the recovery partition. 64 bit Vista. I started yesterday at about 3pm and its now almost noon and still running. I did not watch the recovery process closely but I did see that it made it to the bottom of a checklist in about 1hr and then its been on a screen with 2 progress bars that says "installing software".

Every so often the system will reboot and the desktop will flash for a few seconds. All looks OK from glancing at the desktop but I know that does not tell me much. When it reboots, I do have the option of hitting escape for the start menu on the black HP screen, have not tried that.

I'm at a loss for what to do at this point. I dont think anything is wrong with the hard drive, it was working fine before the attempted recovery and keeps booting fine before it goes right back to the "installing software" screen. Could it just be stuck in some infinite loop for no good reason? Is there a way to stop it and see what I got?

I know system recovery can take a while (sometimes 5 or more hours) but at 20+, I'm starting to get concerned.

Thanks for any help/suggestions!

Lets see if it is a hardware problem
Download Ubuntu and use for a few days. If all is good, we will go into the recovery problem
Use Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows Computer - How-To Geek
Be sure not to install Ubuntu on the recovery partition.

OK,

Ubuntu is installed and I'm booting into it just fine.

However, I had to totally wipe all drives (including recovery) for it to install. Now its also telling me that I do not have the hardware required to run unity (which is, I think, their fancier GUI). This I know used to be false as I did dual boot with ubuntu on this machine in the past and always ran the unity GUI. I installed ubuntu today from the exact same cd that I used to install it on a partition about 5 months ago.

I think something is/was seriously screwed up on both the recovery drive and the C drive and combofix might have done it. Yes I was stupid to run it without expert help, I know.

I think the only option at this point is to get the factory restore disk from HP. In the meantime, the "you dont have the hardware necessary to run unity" message from ubuntu is disconcerting when it used to be fine. Is this something that the factory restore disk could fix or would it be something entirely hardware related or no way of knowing?

Thanks!

Download the upgrade advisor for Seven and see what it says
Download: Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details