right I have been given a rb951g-2hnd bricked well sort of bricked.. it boots but will not factory reset from the seems of it, the reset button is disabled but wondering if I can resurrect it if not oh well

Can you netinstall the device? It's the definite way of getting rid of any kind of germs that might lurk in dark corners of device's storage.

Note that netinstall is a pretty fragile process and it's important to really follow the procedure from the document I linked. There are reports that linux netinstall is a bit more robust than windows ...

And a gotcha: with fairly recent versions of ROS/routerboot it's possible to disable some features, one of them being reset button. Read about Protected routerboot in routerboot manual.

why thank sir I will have a read through