What are the chances of a virus infecting a recovery partion?

My mother's computer is has an SSD and HDD. I believe Windows is installed on the SSD.

She received a message on her computer that she had a virus and was told to call a number. She called and they installed some type of software called LogMeIn and were able to access her computer. They did something to her computer and printed an invoice on her printer.

With this type of virus what are the chances it infected the recovery partition?

The system does not have a CD player so I am wondering if I need to go out and buy a USB stick to reinstall windows or can I use the recovery partition to perform a factory restore.

Fortunately she contacted her bank and was able to recover the money she paid the scammers.

If she never called them would they have been able to access her computer?

 

If they gained remote access to her PC, it's quite possible OS files could have been tampered with.

A clean install from a USB device is probably the safest route.
Download the Microsoft Windows Install Tool to your USB device
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

1. Put the USB into your system and restart your computer.

2. Enter the boot menu as soon as the computer begins to boot.

3. Boot from your USB device

4. Click install now and click through the various options.

5. Once you get to the option to "upgrade" or "Custom", click on Custom.

6. At the screen where it asks you to choose which drive to install Windows on, check the SIZE of your storage devices. your SSD device probably has smaller total storage than the HDD. Remember your SSD's drive NUMBER (either 0 or 1), this will be important in the next step.

7. At the screen where it asks you to choose which drive to install Windows on, press Shift+F10 and a DOS window should open

type the following: diskpart
[hit ENTER key]
type the following: list disk
[hit ENTER]
type the following: sel disk # (replace " # " with the correct drive number for your SSD!)
[hit ENTER]
type the following: clean
[hit ENTER]

To be safe, also use this to wipe the HDD.

close the DOS window

6. Refresh your storage device list. Your drive should say "unallocated", select the unallocated drive and click next to reinstall Windows.


Once Windows is re-installed, do your mom a HUGE favor and make Google Chrome her default web browser and download Ad-Block so she is not tempted to click on malicious/fraudulent ads.

Also, an excellent anti-virus to use it BitDefender.