Aspire Recovery

Acer Aspire 5542.

Was used for many years without anykind of house keeping,. this happened after the owner had visited a site and told me that it had tried to run some kind of nasty which he supposedly avoided, however i cant be certain so think malware is the cause

Issue.

Would like to run a full factory reset, but when i press F8 and enter the rescue menu and choose Recovery management, the system just hangs, the mouse hand is still moveable, so its not locked up.

If i run system restore from the same box i get told no restore points have been created, yet im sure W7 creates them by default, i can view the C drive and cant find a sysvolume folder anywhere so it may have been disabled or deleted by the malware, running the attrib command shows hidden folders but none marked sysvolume or similar

If i run a command prompt and choose to chkdsk the E drive, it literally takes all night to run, the C drive was no better, when i first ran a chkdsk on that it took two attempts to clear the cross linked and orphaned files of it, The C drive now runs chkdsk's in a few seconds, the E drive still takes a long time to run

Im sure that the issue is related to a failed E: drive, and i believe from looking at the drive structure that the restore partition is on this drive.

So the question is can i kick start the restore manually via the command prompt, or if worst case scenario, can i install a new HDD and buy a restore disk for the system.

As princess leia said " your my only hope"