Advent Laptop

Moved you to the techie forum.

Have you tried F8?

Should your Windows develop serious errors or fail to start, you can restore your computer back to factory settings by using the hard drive recovery located on a hidden partition on the hard drive.

To restore your computer back to factory settings, follow the steps below:

Turn on the computer and keep tapping F8 until the advanced options menu is displayed
Use the up/down arrow keys on the keyboard to highlight Repair Your Computer and press enter to select it

UKT Support - Advent 5611 Laptop

Tried it. It just comes up with the option but as soon as you hit F8 it loads just like normal!

any recovery boot disks?

boot from a windows installation disk and delete any partitions that way and install fresh?

Hitting F8 is somewhat of a skill, you have a very small a precise time window in which to get it, we recommend tapping F8 repeatedly to ensure it loads, then once you are in those menus you have to use Enter once you have selected the correct options.

Although it depends on what you want the outcome to be, repair your computer will bring up a set of options with repair tools to fix start up errors etc. Not really used to restore the machine to factory settings, you'd want to choose Reinstall Windows, which shows as an option, although remember to back up all of your documents.