Hi
About a week ago my elderly aunt's Inspiron N5110 ( bought new in December 2012 and running McAfee) was hacked with the result that the machine will now only operate in safe mode. I have looked at the machine and suspect the hard disk will need reformatting, or restoring the operating system to its factory settings. There is no data on the machine which needs backing up.
I have tried pressing F8 on start up but after trying some of the menu options the machine remains stuck in safe mode. The restore option does not appear to work from within the safe mode environment and the machine will not boot in normal mode, possibly due to something the hackers have done.
The only disk provided with the machine was one containing drivers and utilities, although this would not run when I tried to boot the machine from the DVD drive, so I assume I will need an original Windows 7 disk to carry out a fresh install.
Since Dell no longer provide a system disk, how can I access the setup files on the machine's hard disk in order to make a boot disk, or is there another way to recover this machine without reformatting?