Restoring Windows 8 to Factory settings

[Coach]

So, something happened with my HP All-in-one and now the apps won't work and I'm concerned the PC is corrupted. All I want to do is restore it to factory settings. There is a simple way to do this through the control panel, but my PC has removed the ability somehow. So I'm looking for the long/more technical way to do this. I just got off the phone with HP and they were going to charge me $100 just to speak to a technician.

I clearly explained I don't care about backing it up, I don't care what the underlying issue is. I just want to restore it so I don't have to deal with this anymore and move on with my life. Does anyone here know how to restore Windows 8 to factory settings without the use of the built-in app? Any help would be great. Thanks!

[cDnStealth]

Originally Posted by MattyC

So, something happened with my HP All-in-one and now the apps won't work and I'm concerned the PC is corrupted. All I want to do is restore it to factory settings. There is a simple way to do this through the control panel, but my PC has removed the ability somehow. So I'm looking for the long/more technical way to do this. I just got off the phone with HP and they were going to charge me $100 just to speak to a technician.

I clearly explained I don't care about backing it up, I don't care what the underlying issue is. I just want to restore it so I don't have to deal with this anymore and move on with my life. Does anyone here know how to restore Windows 8 to factory settings without the use of the built-in app? Any help would be great. Thanks!

Do you have a physical copy of the OS on a DVD or USB? Because you could just reformat.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/w.../clean-install

[Coach]

Originally Posted by cDnStealth

Do you have a physical copy of the OS on a DVD or USB? Because you could just reformat.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/w.../clean-install

Its the reformatting That's the problem. It tells me a partition is missing so I cant run a system restore/recovery. So getting to the point of reinstalling windows is the issue.

[Looch City]

Could you take a screenshot of the error? This is definitely fixable and you don't need to spend any money on "technicians".

If all else fails, you can install a brand new Windows using a bootable USB created from: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/w...-refresh-media

[Coach]

My younger, more tech-savvy brother was working on it last night. He was working on finding the restore partition which I guess is "hidden", but last I spoke with him the command to unhide it wasn't working for him. I'm not sure how far he got, but he was pretty in-deep with it and worked on it for a few hours yesterday. Hopefully he got it. Thanks for the USB tip.