fujitsu - why hide away the factory reset button?

[nudone]

no doubt this is common knowledge with the world playing a cruel trick on me so that i never find out...

i needed to factory reset a fujitsu siemens notebook (amilo li 3710). vista is loading to a black screen with mouse cursor and that's all. i've read around the net for solutions and my conclusion is: i haven't got time to test every possible "solution". hence, factory reset is my friend.

the problem is, i've no idea how to start the process when booting up - there's no indication of what keys to press other than F2 for bios and F12 for boot order.

the weird thing is - i accidently got the factory reset menu to appear so i'm now waiting for the reset to finish its job. i really have no idea how it come on - i only pressed the F12 key again liked i'd done several times already but this time it skipped the boot order menu.

what's annoying is that i can't find any sensible info online about what keys to press. am i suffering from selective search blindness?

is anyone familiar with a fujitus amilo notebook and how factory reset is initiated while booting - maybe it involves holding down the F12 key whilst booting????????

thanks if you can help.

(i'm not convinced this factory reset is actually working - seems to be taking a very long time.)

[gexecuter]

Have you checked the manual?

[nudone]

this is the helpful information found in the manual..

"Restoring the operating system, drivers, manuals and special software
You can find information on how to restore the operating system, drivers, manuals
and special software in the "Recovery Process" manual."

of course, the question is, why haven't they put the "recovery process" manual on the hard drive with the "normal" manual. i'll see if i can find it online - maybe it exists somewhere out there in the ether.

the machine is now restored anyway. the first factory reset was taking a long time because it wasn't doing anything - that was a great time waster. thanks fujitsu.

i'm still not sure what happened. i tried to reinstall vista - which simply brought up the factory reset options when rebooting. i'm not even going to try and figure out what's going on as it's working - that's all that counts.

[nudone]

i've had a look through fujitsu's downloadable pdfs called "recovery process". none mention the required information from what i can see.

plenty of stuff about sticking disks into the drive and booting from them - which isn't very helpful.

[MerleOne]

On Samsung netbooks, it's F4 !

[nudone]

okay, thanks. unfortunately i can't test things at the moment as i don't have a fujitsu laptop with me. i'll see how things go next time i can use one.