Creative Connections

Problem History

We recently had a client whos broadband  service had been suspended by their internet service provider (ISP) due to their laptop having been hijacked with a virus and being used as part of a botnet.  In order to for the clients broadband service to be restored the ISP was insisting on the hard drive being reformatted and the operating system being reinstalled.   The clients laptop model was a Hewlett Packard HP550.

The following text has been taken directly from the Hewlett Packard support site and is essential information when deciding how to proceed if you need to recover your HP laptop or PC.

HP provided operating system or recovery discs for most PCs made from 2001 to 2005, but stopped including recovery discs in 2006. At that point HP configured the computers with a recovery function that lets you: recover the OS from files stored on a special partition on the hard drive without needing an optical disc drive, or create a personal recovery disc that is specific to your computer. For most models, a replacement recovery disc can be purchased from HP. See HP Notebook PCs - Order Recovery Discs For Windows 7, Vista, Or XP .

HPP50 Laptop Restore Solution

• To start I rebooted the laptop and continually pressed escape (Official HP 550 Maintenance and Service Guides says F11 so you can also try that)
• This then gave me a screen with an option to press F8 for advanced options – I Pressed F8
• I selected the option - 'Restore hard drive to its original factory state'
• I then followed the instructions from there onwards.

Basically what happened is the hard drive was reformatted (wiped) removing all the data and removing the nasty botnet viruses the client had picked up. This took approximately an hour.

Once the hard drive had been reformatted the Vista Home Premium operating system was automatically reinstalled, this only required a few very simple self explanatory inputs from me such as regional options, keyboard, date & time settings and a user name .

Once that was completed, before doing anything else I made sure that the windows firewall was on and immediately went on line to activate and update the preinstalled 60 day trial version of McFee.

And that was it – the whole process took about an hour and a half.

If the above does not work or for a different model HP computers this link to the HP technical support section is very useful.