Hi All need some help, please. I am restoring my pc and i am taking it back too factory setting how it 3 years old and i have a white screen with a gray box in it with an icon of a pc with a magnifying class running around it how its been doing this for 12 hours now and the line in green is moving faster now does anyone know how long it will take or can i stop it?
Well it certainly shouldn't take anything like 12 hours to do a factory restore. Windows Vista restore normally completes in a couple of hours max. Unless there's a problem with the hard drive such as it having developed a fault and on the verge of failing.
You can check if this is the case by running the drive manufacturer's own diagnostic software from a bootable CD. You obviously need first to know what brand of drive it is. Then visit their website on a working PC and download the diagnostic setup file from which a bootable CD can be created.
Insert that CD into your wife's PC and boot from it. It will run a series of tests and inform you if the drive has failed any of them. If it does fail any of the tests, you will need to replace that drive with a new one. Be aware that if you do have to fit a new drive, you will only be able to do a factory recovery to the new drive if the recovery files are on a set of CDs you have made previously or which were supplied by the PC manufacturer.
