Restoring a netbook to factory settings

In recent years, most notebook manufacturers do not bother to put a system recovery disk in the box with the device they purchased.
In most cases, this situation is typical if you purchase a netbook.
Is there usually no optical drive?
This means that the restoration of the system must be done somehow differently.

Of course, most manufacturers offer various utilities to restore the "snapshots" of the system or even the original "factory" state.

But there is one "BUT".
In 99.99% of cases, the manufacturer assumes that you still have a Windows partition, and the Recovery partition is in the right place, that you, as a bona fide PC user, have read the instructions and made all kinds of BackUp.
Yes, it also assumes that Windows is generally loaded.
')
Naive, yes?

Under cut, one of the options for doing if everything was "as always."



It so happened that I needed to restore the netbook to the “factory settings”.
Those. - get its original appearance: “as it was from the store” ...

The situation was complicated by the fact that the device did not have a boot disk.
A good friend before selling copied all the necessary data and made the full format of everything that I could reach.
How he got it is not so important, it was necessary to do something.

Luckily, the playful pens of the device owner did not touch the partition with Recovery.
Apparently something somewhere all the same clicked in the brain, and he survived, but, alas, he was not bootable and lay in a completely different place on the disk (most likely someone who was humane and prudent used sometime utilities like Acronis Disk Director or gParted).

At that time, I had only a bootable Windows 7 flash drive from the “tools at hand for solving Wndows-problems”. How to search for it on the Microsoft website, you will be offered this option if you purchase Win 7 for a netbook. There is a special utility that makes such a trick from the already downloaded ISO.

UPD 1: thanks for the exact comment TIgorA .

UPD 2: Please note, I had ONLY this flash drive, and nowhere in the reach was Windows installed.

Booting into the installation, I chose "System Restore" in the lower left corner of the window.
In the opened window I found the “console” - the one where the cursor flashes in the “C: \” prompt.

My cursor blinked on "x: \".

I suppose everyone knows what the CD and DIR commands are for.

It was with their help that I found out that there was only an absolutely clean “C: \” drive on the ward.
And also the “D: \” disk in which there is a handful of Win 7 boot loader folders.

In one of the folders I found “Firmware.wim”.

Searches by brand of device manufacturer and the name of this file led to a simple explanation:
This is the system image - factory settings.

Those. it was quite appropriate to do everything “as needed”.

It remains to understand how it can be "unpacked."

Repeated searches gave the name of the utility: "IMAGEX.EXE".
It was immediately downloaded to my installation flash.

Booting into the console the second time I entered the command:

IMAGEX.EXE /apply __Factory.wim 1 :


And after 10 minutes I received an answer that, they say, everything was done.

I suppose that everything is clear except the number "1" - this is the number of the image in the WIM archive.
The fact is that there may be several images in it.
I came up first, I did not dig further.

But, the computer did not boot.

Run from the installation flash drive.
But, instead of the console, we now select “Startup Recovery”, this happened three times in my case.

1. At first it turned out that there are no boot disks.
2. There was no boot sector on the disk
3. There was no loader itself.

As a result, it was loaded ...
The first time I saw a laptop is loaded "for the first time."
It was a long time, but very interesting.

Then a bunch of updates went, everything is standard, but this is another story.

Conclusion: be prudent, make backup; ^)