Factory reset taking a long time.

[marce22]

I am making a factory reset using the HP recovery manager . I am using 

  5 system imagen DVDs. Every seemed.to be ok until the 4th dvd, but after.inserted the last DVD there has not.been any answer from the system, and more.than 1 hour has passed. Shoul I.have to continue waiting? Please.help.me.regards.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@marce22

A factory reset can easily take 2-3 hours, and that presumes there is nothing wrong with the hard drive/

Unfortunately, the most common reason why folks try to force a factory reset is the PC slowing down seriously -- and that is nearly always due to a failing drive.

If your reset continues at a steady pace and then appears to "hang" for an hour more, then most likly, especially with an older Win8-era laptop, the drive is probably failing, and if that is the case, the reset is never going to finish.

If your PC is new enough to support UEFI, you can use these steps to test the hard drive: http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c00439024

If not, you have to follow these steps:
1) Press Esc key repeatedly, several times a second, while rebooting the laptop. Do NOT hold the key down, just press it over and over.
2) Eventually, you will see an HP Startup Menu -- that will look similar to the image below ...

3) press the Function key for testing the hard drive (usually F2) and let it run.

Please report back the test results.

[marce22]

Thank you very much for your help. Finally I downloaded a windows 10 copy from Microsoft to a usb disk drive, which was fast and easy. I modified the BIOS for booting the PC from the USB port, and in relatively low time the windows was installed. Regards!