The puter is grandson's Acer 5336 laptop, heavyly infested with malwares and viruses. I managed to clean out the malwares and viruses. At this point it is usable. It can connect to the internet but unable to connect to any network I have (homegroup or workgroup). The best I can tell, windows firewall is blocking it. All attempts to change windows firewall settings failed. Ran "chkdsk" to check for file corruptions failed too. Chkdsk stalls at certain point in step 4, then reboots itself and start chkdsk all over. Perhaps there are some bad spots on the hard drive chkdsk cannot get past. Here is my mixed bag of questions: 1. If I do a factory reset via e-recovery, will it map around the bad areas on the hard drive? 2. If I do a clean install of win 7, can I format only the partition win 7 is installing to? 3. When doing a clean install, which product key to use? The one Jellybean pull off windows or the one on the sticker? Thanks jt
I wouldn't spend any time with a drive that can't run Chkdsk. Replace the drive. You already have enough of an obstacle getting a grandchild to understand not to click "Yes"/"I Agree" every time an unrequested dialog pops up. And yes, I'm speaking from experience.
I took door #1, did a "factory Reset" via Erecovery. All seem to be fine. All I have to do now is to spend few hours uninstall all the junks the OEM installed. LOL Chkdsk found 1 bad cluster and replaced it on the first run. Luckily, it was in the hiberfil.sys location. No file was corrupted. Chkdsk did not find anything on the second run. Yes, I have a new hard drive on the way, just in case. Thanks for the help again. jt