Factory reset when Win7 has been removed from main partition

[wrwEnvy17]

I am getting this old laptop ready for sale. I booted to a USB drive and wiped the C: partition, where Windows 7 was installed. I then reformatted it in NTFS and set it as the active partition.

When I rebooted and pressed F11 to get to System Recovery, I get a message there is no operating system on the C drive.

How can I do a factory reset at this point? The recovery partition is still there, I checked, so that's good. I have ISOs for the recovery CDs, but i would need to burn them to disk to use them. Is there a way to perform the factory reset from the recovery partition, without going through the hassle of doing this? I heard that there might be an option to boot from a USB drive?

Thanks in advance

[DavidPK]

Hi,

Instead of marking the C partition as active, try setting the Recovery partition D as active, then restart and see if it boots into the Recovery Manager application.

Regards,

DP-K

[wrwEnvy17 · Accepted solution]

Didn't work. I guess I'll need to go buy some CDs 😕