Thinking this system has a recovery partition at say D: so if you took option ( F ) it would wipe C: clean and rebuild it back to factory settings. * All personal data would get wiped out!
( R ) looks to be the Repair Option and I would suggest that instead if you have important info you dont want to lose.
*** Once you have the system running healthy again you can either use a tool that HP placed on the system to burn a set of DVD's or a USB Pen Drive with the recovery disk info to have in case the hard drive ever crashes, or if running Windows 7 can send an image to a USB or External Hard Drive which can be transferred back to a hard drive using a bootable Windows 7 repair disc and then grough through a what can be confusing process to restore. OR use a disk imaging software to create a ghost image of the C: drive and D: drive if its partitioned with recovery on D: etc, and have that as a system recovery method. I like Ghost 2003 for Windows XP OS which can be purchased cheap on ebay etc. Ghost 2003 does not support Vista, 7, or 8 though and to back up newer OS you would want to get a modern disk image utility. Many out there and the better ones cost money although there are free options.
