Problems going back to factory condition.

[leannedozier]

This PC came out in 2012 so it's sort of old. It came with Windows 8. I hardly ever used it and never had even had it hooked to the internet until I installed Windows 10.I downloaded it free from the internet. Then my disk drive wouldn't work. I installed a third party app to get it to work and all is well with that now. Like I said, this computer has hardly been used and I want to sell it. I don't want to sell it with a broken disk drive, or explain that they would have to use a 3rd party app to use it, so I thought I'd restore it to factory settings. This is where my problem is. I do not have the option to go back to Win 8 in the recovery section. Then when I restore the PC and choose the erase everything option, it still has Win 10 on it. Then I noticed that my D drive is almost full, but  this machine has 1TB of memory. I then tried to clean up my D drive, but nothing deletes out of it. Is there a way to completely restore it to factory settings? I do not have a disk but it's got to have a hidden recovery file right? And how can I empty my D drive? Thanks in advance!

[Grzwacz]

Greetings,

Welcome to the forum.

I am not a HP employee.

You have a couple of options:

You can sell the PC with no data on the HDD using one of the disk wiping utilities at this site (Link).

Or you can order HP Recovery media at this (Link).

Install windows 10 clean with no password required.

Let the buyer configure Windows.

Regards

[leannedozier]

Thanks for your reply. Somehow I fixed it. 🙂 I reset it again erasing everything and it went back to Win 8. The D drive was still full though and I reformatted it and now it's nearly blank. It was just strange that I had to reset it twice, but I'm glad it's done. 🙂