Windows 7 Virus issue- affecting recovery partition?

[JCM77]

Hello, I've been asked to take a look at a computer system earlier this year. The owner had some sort of false FBI warning trying to get money from them. Since I successfully resolved that on another user's computer system, I checked on theirs too.
They have what I believe is an HP Pavilion laptop with Windows 7. I tried setting the system to restore to factory settings, but I get an error at about 48% recovery, and it is unable to restore the system. I will be asking HP too about this, but their site is down as I type this.

The user had also tried going to the command prompt from the recovery mode. However, when they tried to do that, whatever keys they would type, a bunch of other letters would show up instead.

I don't think that I can make a recovery disk from their system, since I cannot even restore it. I think that it also won't boot past some problem screen during the boot attempts if not in recovery mode.

Has anybody ran into a similar issue? I think that their computer is out of warranty, and would like to see if it is possible to still do some sort of system recovery.
I am wondering if some sort of antivirus boot disc might do the trick.

Thanks.

 

[patcooke]

You could try usinbg control panel to set the recovery partition to be the active boot partition the restart to see if you can force it to boot into recovery. If that fails you are best off buying a recovery dvd from HP.

 

[ickymay]

what is the error message ?

plug the hard drive up to another pc with a usb interface or direct sata if possible then scan from your system with some useful tools like MSE then Malwarebytes and then TDSSKiller from Kaspersky and possibly Gmer to check for rootkits.

let us know how that goes.

 

[Joe S]

MS has a stand alone scanner that you burn to disk and boot from to do the scan. That might be worth a try before anything more drastic.
Joe