Recovery Cd vs Quickrestore : both wipe C drive ?

Neighbor is having issues with his presario 5200. The PC takes about 15
minutes to get to a desktop and after picking thru
registry/ccleaner/adaware etc, I want to restore his C drive to windows
factory settings from the D partition. I haven't messed with Compaq
recovery CD's in a lot of years and need to know: does the recovery just
"fix" the windows folders ?
i.e. ... can he leave all of his mp3's, jpg's etc on there and still
have them after the recovery ? Or will the c partition be
wiped/reformatted with the recovery CD too?

I have a presario that's same model and I have recovery and quickrestore
CD's ( that I ordered when new ).but never used either. If he doesn't
need to backup it would be a 45 minute job to restore from his D
partition. If I have to back it all up to another drive then restore his
stuff, it will be a nuisance and I'm trying to make it easy on myself.

Usually with a Q-Restore CD, it re-formats the drive, then copies the
image off the cd that matches to model # of your computer. It also
makes a second partition for the quick restore image on the HD, though
newer Compaq's (I'm not sure) may have an option to let you recover
the data.

~~Mitch