I have a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7422 laptop and im wanting to restore it to the factory settings. I have heard this can be achieved by pressing f8 while starting the laptop up but my question is if i do this am I going to lose vista my operating system and the drivers needed to run the computer. I dont care about loosing pictures videos ect... and have the disks for any programs that would need to be re-installed such as for my internet. But i dont have a recovery disk and i use my laptop for school so i cant have anything go wrong when i do my restore. Thanks for the help in advanced!

Can u b more specific about the symptoms of whats wrong?

Why do you feel you need to do a restore? "I have heard this can be achieved by pressing f8 while starting the laptop" That will bring up the Advanced Boot Options menu where you can select Safe Mode, Safe Mode with networking, Last Known Good Configuration, etc. If you wanna reset to factory defaults using the hidden recovery partition, press & hold the zero (0) key immediately at bootup & the Toshiba Recovery Wizard will pop up. I don't recommend it though...you will lose everything. Better to try to repair your current setup 1st. The recovery method should be a last resort.

OS: Windows Vista F8 key at bootup does invoke TOSHIBA HDD Recovery that recover the complete Windows Vista to its original state. Carefully read & follow the procedures given in THIS link. i_Xp/VistaUser