Dell Latitude D620

my friend had their laptop stolen, but they got it back when the morons who stole it were seen in the stolen car they were driving….but before the police gave back my friends computer, the people that stole it did something to this guys computer that i dont know how to bypass….im pretty good with computers and i have had a lot of successful experience fixing my friends HP laptop….i have a sony viao and i have had to rewrite the hard drive, and delete the partitions a couple times, so im definitely knowledgeable and a few steps up from a beginner….but i have not had any experience with Dells when it comes to technical issues, and i just dont know what to do or where i can go online that will tell me how to resolve this problem step by step. for example, i didnt know how to delete the partitions on my friends computer, but i was able to goto the HP website and i put in the model number and the service tag, and with that came an online instruction manual on how to do things like that, so thats why i was able to do that. so if anyone knows how they can help then that would be great….we do have a genuine windows cd to install on the computer, so if full deletion of all hard drives, and partitions is the only way to go about resolving this issue, then thats fine……all responses will be greatly appreciated!! Thank you in advance!

Not sure about your issue, but as a thought, have you tried resetting the system to out of the box status ? Bare in mind this will wipe everything as though they are turning it on for the first time. not knowing what has been done can often prove more troublesome than it's worth, if this is a route you go for if you can use it enough to back up files then do that first if needed, but Dell usually have a weird way to enter the recovery console, I think it's ctrl + F11 while booting from memory, not an ideal solution, but not knowing what may of been done to it this is the safest\surest route, hope it helps.

i read somewhere that there is a hidden recovery partition inside dell notebooks, but its accessing it that is tricky, and varies depending on the model….so does anyone have any info on that? that is what i need, in my opinion