Using Recovery Manager on infected Windows 7 HP laptop

[Windows Pilgrim]

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Hello,

I have a question regarding using Recovery Manager on a virus-infected HP Notebook running 64-bit Windows 7. I've searched this forum for a thread on this particular, but have found none, and have done on-line searches and perused the HP support pages regarding Recovery Manager, but have found no answers to my particular questions; hence, this thread.

The computer has been infected with malware that the Norton Internet Security and Norton Power Remover cannot fully eradicate (apparently if this were a 32-bit machine, this virus would have been taken care of fully, according to the technical write-up at the Norton/Symantec site). There is not much on the computer that needs to be saved, so it seems the best strategy is to do a factory-fresh re-installation of the machine using Recovery Manager.

The laptop comes with a recovery partition and the Recovery Manager software that can reinstall to factory settings from this partition as well as create a one-time set of recovery/bootable disks for this machine. Unfortunately, these disks were not created when the computer was new/uninfected. I'm doing this for a family member's machine, and I was not aware of this fact until this infection problem arose (being a Mac user, I assumed that every machine comes with bootable installation/recovery disks), so please don't bother casting any judgement stones in this regard.

I'm not sure what the best way of going forward is because of the following unanswered questions I have:

1) Can the Recovery Manager (a Cyberlink product) do a "factory fresh" re-installation more than once?

If not, then I should create the one-time set of bootable recovery disks before attempting this; however, this leads to my second question:

2) Will creating the bootable recovery disks from the infected computer, albeit from the hopefully clean and secure recovery partition, possibly result in infected disks? Answers to this that I have seen elsewhere are mixed.

Any insight provided on these matters would be much appreciated.

[BpnV]

1) Can the Recovery Manager (a Cyberlink product) do a "factory fresh" re-installation more than once?

Yes you can try out the "factory fresh" re-installation more than once and i will suggest you to do the same rather than creating bootable recovery disks from your infected computer. Hope that helps.

[Windows Pilgrim]

Thank you, you answered my bottom-line. I really appreciate it.

[UglyDuckling1337]

hey man...Try using Malware Bytes anti malware before doing re-installation...its free and extremely effective..norton sux btw..

[Windows Pilgrim]

@UglyD,

Your suggestion of Malwarebytes has made me consider it as a replacement for Norton when the reincarnated two-month trial expires (Avast and MS Security Essentials are the other products I am considering).

However, as I said previously, there wasn't much that was really necessary to save on this rig. And since the registry was all screwed up, with multiple services disabled, and I am not an old hand with Windows computers (hence my user name), it seemed best to do a clean install. After which it was then quite comforting to see all the services running as they should be and what files and folders/directories disappeared (i.e. ones that were said to be indicative of a rootkit virus).

For others who may have the same questions I did: if one has a recovery partition, then yes, one can use it multiple times to do "factory-fresh" reinstallations, and afterwards I was then able to confidently make a set of virus-free recovery/reinstallation discs. And for anyone fairly inexperienced with a Windows system, it is A LOT easier to start over with a clean system and start learning about its innards than trying to fix and clean-up thoroughly a computer with a bad case of the cyber clap.