LAPTOP DISASTER

I've had a disaster with Di's laptop which was getting very slow and having lots of hang-ups. I decided the best plan was to use the restore disks to get back to day one factory settings. A tweak in the bios to boot from CD powered up the disk and the process started with a format of the hard drive. OK that's to be expected I thought but then " Files Corrupt, application terminated" Oh my God everything gone and absolutely no way back.
The only thing I could do was to use a spare copy of XP which I used on an Asus notebook to replace the Linux (Ugh) system. I eventually took XP off and re-installed Linux in order to sell the notebook on eBay.
So it powered up ok with the XP installation but had no drivers, it was barely alive! A few hours of searching on another pc found drivers on the Packard Bell web site and one by one they installed. I was then rewarded by the message "wireless access point found" so it's mostly all back- phew
The really annoying thing is that the restore programme does actually have a checking/validation feature but it's hidden in sub menus rather than being the first step which would be quite helpful to say the least!