Restore UL20A hard drive

Hi guys,

I have a big problem. Maybe you can help me.

I bought this laptop more than a year ago, and thanks to all the bloatware it came with, I had to do a clean install of Windows. The laptop came with Windows 7 Home Premium Japanese edition, and since I am more comfortable using English edition, I installed the English edition. (I could use the activation key that came with the laptop.)

Since the laptop doesn't come with an optical drive and trying to install Windows using the USB drive method didn't work, I had to do a trick. I removed the drive from the laptop and moved it to the desktop PC, started the installation on the desktop PC and when it restarted for the first time, I turned OFF the desktop PC and moved the drive back to the laptop. Since Windows doesn't do any configuration stuff up to that point, I could continue the installation on the laptop and voila.

Since this method was a pain in the , I figured out that I could reinstall Windows from the hard drive using this method. It works fine. Perfectly fine.

Except, now I need to restore the hard drive to the factory defaults. I assume that installing Windows using the recovery discs would do the trick.

First I thought, copying the Asus Recovery Media contents to that recovery partition (youtube video link above) would do the trick. But it doesn't. It boots into setup fine, but hangs there.

I don't have a USB optical drive, nor a USB-SATA cable which I could use with my desktop DVD drive. I can order one from ebay, but it takes too long to get here. Buying locally is too expensive.

The reason why I need to restore to factory defaults is I am trying to sell it. I cannot sell it in the current state.

I need a quick solution. Even if there is a way to get USB boot drive working, then OK. I think I can borrow a flash drive from a friend. But the last time I tried, it didn't work. It seemed as if it made itself a hard drive, and tried to install onto that drive itself. The setup could not continue.

Any ideas?