Unable to restore G50vt-X5 to factory settings

This is a quick problem, hopefully...

I just sold this laptop on eBay, earning back a whopping 2/5ths of the original price (kudos to my dumb ). I need to delete everything, and ship it out so that when the buyer boots the PC, it shows as if it were brand new out of the box--basic stuff, I've done it before after massive malware attacks...

I push F9 a few hundred times during boot, I get a menu that gives me one option: start windows vista normally...or a few more options (safe mode, etc if I press F8).

No evidence whatsoever of any chance at entering a system restore process, nothing...I've tried F8, F9, even F11! I said F11! Nothing new, just more rubbish that spits me back out, my desktop staring me in the face.

The partition is there, it bloody is! But no hot key is letting me find my way to restoring the PC to factory settings...and in case you're wondering, I only have one CD, a basic driver disc...

 

Do you have AI recovery installed in windows? IF you do I would try to repair it, and try to create the DVD's for recovery.

Also try ESC when you cold boot and check for recovery option(s).

 

Usually there's a Repair Computer or equivalent option when you hit F9. Is there a download for the Asus G50vt recovery disc .iso? Maybe you can just burn a new one.

 

I pushed f9 to bloody high hell, and received the familiar screen of booting to Vista, more advanced options after pressing F8 included as said earlier, safe mode, safe mode with command prompt/networking and driver repair...nothing substantial like "enter recovery" or "choose boot partition."

I pushed ESC on boot, I can see my four booting devices...for some reason, my ethernet/wifi slot, my cd-dvd drive, and two hard drives (I have two, though no matter if I choose to boot into one or the other, I'm given Vista...despite the other being Fedora Linux--I have to manually open up the laptop and switch HDD positions to get Linux to boot properly grr)....

No recovery disk, I went over that drama a few years back when I entered this same process (yet I've moved on, building several computers and yet my knowledge of software remains at EMPTY)...I have a hidden partition, I can see in system info from Asus Utilities that the primary (Vista) HDD still has two partitions, so I assume that means I didn't delete or overwrite my recovery partition last time I did this loopy task...

I'm at a loss, I have to ship this out by Tuesday night, I've got finals....and I'm positively baffled at what I'm doing wrong.

 

Minor update: I should of pointed out, I haven't much touched this laptop in over a year--hence my finally selling it...I opened up My Computer and saw right in front of me, an unhidden icon "Recovery F:" or what I assume to be the recovery partition...this of course makes me feel a wee bit better, but now raises obvious questions of why I can't access it when I push ESC during boot.

 

I hate to bump this again--not without due cause though.

I no longer can boot to Windows. Absolute bummer. I start the PC, I get the ROG splash, a few explosion sounds, and a driver checklist before I am turned over into a dark abyss of nothingness.

I can reach BIOS, but that's about it (ESC and F2 work, F9 and F8 are useless). I tripped onto a new screen by pushing F1, and found what I thought was the recovery partition under a listing of A: B: C: D: drives (though my partition is F: and there was no F , I chose Recovery.WIM, and was greeted with "File is incomplete, cannot boot, returning to POST"...

Of note, Express Gate still works. And now, my second HDD with Fedora which I would occasionally boot to, no longer appears to be identified by the BIOS menu...

I went ahead and refunded the ebay buyer, so now I'm just a bum asking for help for a laptop I don't even use anymore...and I feel like crap.

 

Drive letters vary depending on what the OS is configured to recognize them as, so you're best of trying D: for your recovery thing.

If I still had my recovery partition I'd image it for you. Have you searched Asus' driver site for a recovery disc? If not, do you have the original OEM key? I'm not sure how it works but you might be able to pick up a Vista Home Premium iso for free straight from Microsoft and then use your OEM key on the bottom to activate it.

See this post for details on Vista discs and all that: 64-bit (x64) Windows Vista Official Direct Download Links My Digital Life

This might have worked a lot better if Windows booted in the first place. :/

...Also you're absolutely sure you don't have a recovery disc of any sort, correct?

 

Literally, out of dumb luck--when trying to burn a mix CD (anybody still use CDs besides me?), I found the disc was already occupied--and had Neosmart's Windows recovery bundle on it...this was exactly what I thought I needed, but had no interest in paying for (when did Neosmart start charging?) since I no longer used the laptop...

So, in about five minutes, I'm going to try and decipher the Windows serial key on the bottom of this laptop, it's half blurred--but I think I can manage it...and go ahead and start the factory reset...

So...for now, I am relatively calm.

 

Maybe you figured this out by now but if it's the OEM version of the Windows recovery you might not even need the key! But put some tape or something over the key just in case a future owner would like to read it.

Hope the good luck continues! Keep calm and cool!

 

Nope.

Something's wrong.

I went ahead and tried, managed to get the key right on the first try despite having four options for what the third digit/letter could be (b, G, 6)...then received a message along the lines that something was missing/corrupted, and Windows could not reinstall itself.

Fantastic. Back to square one. I did a clean refresh, and arrived thankfully back at the desktop--running what now shows up as "Windows Vista (Recovered)" all my old files and programs still here.

I have a feeling that my laptop could sell just with the two hard drives, either with Fedora/Mint installed, or not--but having some version of Windows would greatly enhance the attraction to a wider audience...and really, if you buy an 800$ laptop to game on--you don't want to put up with Wine--so I give credit to Windows for having ease of use in that area.

I'm arriving now at the realization that my recovery partition has been tampered with somehow, (not beyond the realm of possibility)...and I wonder, is it possible to just scrub files and programs from my computer and ship it out and let the next guy deal with finding a bootable version of Windows...sure I'll have to change my debit card pins and possibly my steam passwords...if the buyer happens to be that rotten--but I'm getting desperate to have that extra cash on hand.

 

This is what irks me:

"Windows cannot install...yaddi yadda. E:\sources\install.wim doesn't exist, error code: 0x80070002"

I have sense enough to know that this is just a boot repair disk--not an install disk for vista, I also know as stated above, that I have an intact recovery partition that is at least 8GB large, and that it has an "install.wim" file in one of the folders.

What I'm floored by is why it's looking at E: for the file, and not F:, where the recovery partition is located.

 

Remember the installation might rename drive letters since letters don't carry over from OS to OS. So it might very well be accessing the same partition you know as F: and be calling it E: .

Man if I'd kept the recovery partition around I'd just link you to my install.wim. Unfortunately I'm on to Windows 7 already. Have you tried downloading the install.wim from the link I gave you earlier?

You can wipe the hard drive(s) entirely (you can use a program to securely format and overwrite everything from a bootable disc perhaps like GParted) and market it as a laptop with no OS but with a COA (the key you typed in) included. That makes it worth perhaps $50 less than with Windows installed, instead of $100 less since you have the COA still.

 

You could also do a clean install of vista on the drive without the recovery partition (from what i understand, you have two drives in the laptop), activate it with your key and get the drivers/asus utilities needed and market it as a bloatware free G50 .

 

I'm not sure how that would help, given the only source of Windows OS I have is the recovery partition--the only CD provided to me was a driver's disk, and even when I went to make backup disks when I first bought the bloody device, their I Recover software was not installed. Their support line seemed to not believe me, despite me at the time RMA'ing it--and then by their own admission, them saying essentially, "We were wrong."

Two years later, yes I do have two drives. One is an additional HDD I purchased from Microcenter to be a dedicated Linux based HDD, for storage mainly...but it has nothing to do with Vista...if that's what you were speaking to.

And on the note about the link mentioned earlier, I'm not sure I have the time to follow each link...the comments on each page seemed to indicate there were outdated links. Even so, should I be doing that on the laptop, or the Win7 rig I'm typing this on now...I'd assume torrenting and risking any infection would be better done on the PC I'm trying to reset.

 

If you get ahold of an x64 copy of Vista and install Home Premium, you can use your key as tijo said. Nothing shady about that since you're not cracking anything or bypassing activation or whatever.

 

Some good to come out of this is that I managed to get a positive review from the buyer, who appreciated my honesty and speedy refund.

Even without a copy of Windows (restored to factory settings), I still think my laptop is more of a steal for the 250$ sale price than the other two currently up for auction...due to the 320GB extra HDD I had bought...I'm really thinking up just sending it away with the "Recovered" Vista installed...I never put anything important on it, as after the first crash a year ago, I immediately built my own desktop rig...still, I suppose I have to fear someone trolling internet data left over...