Last night my dell laptop with windows 8 went on an automatic update and now it cannot find a bootable device, all of a sudden..
I tried detaching and reattaching the hard drive and no luck. I tried booting both from Legacy boot and UEFI boot, but to no avail.
Any advice? I bought this just over 2 years ago (March 2013) and now its already broken?
nope. it didnt come with a win dvd when purchased
gonna try now
Quote:
sounds like your drive got corrupted.
nope. it didnt come with a win dvd when purchased
You should have made a System Repair Disk when you got the computer. You can make one now from another Windows 8 computer.
Those are just a couple of things that popped up when I Googled "Dell recovery partition".
Dell Recovery
Support may be your best option. :(
Click here and enter your tag number and you should be able to get recover software - ( New Window )
Anyway, if you want to find out if the drive is still good, the easiest way I can think of would be to download a copy of Knoppix (a bootable Linux disk -- just Google "Knoppix download"), then burn it to an image using whatever CD burning software you've got). Once you've done so, put that disk in your CD/DVD ROM drive and boot the computer from that. (If it won't boot from the CD automatically, reboot while repeatedly pressing F8 or F12, which will then bring up a screen with an option ot boot from the CD ROM.) Once you boot it up, you'll get a screen that looks a bit like Windows XP, which has a Windows Explorer-like file manager on it. Use that to navigate to your hard drive. If it's either not there or it's inaccessible, your drive is Elvis Patterson (Toast).
Alternatively, you can do the same thing by pulling the hard drive out of the machine -- which you may have to do anyway. To do so, remove the one phillips-head screw holding the long black-plastic panel in place on the underside of the laptop (underneath the keyboard and mousepad). Once you've removed that screw, you'll be able to slide or pry that panel off with your fingertips. You'll find the hard drive in there, typically held in place in its connector with one screw. Remove it, pull it out, pop it in a USB hard drive enclosure, then plug that into another machine and see if it gives you errors or is readable. Like I said, if that drive says Seagate on it, chances are that it has failed.
Now, you can pick up a standard 500 GB Western Digital SATA III hard drive off of Amazon for a whopping $42.55 or a 1 TB drive for an equally whopping $59.88 as of this writing. If you don't have the Dell Recovery disk that may or may not have come with the machine, you'll need to get in touch with them. If they won't give you one, let me know I can dig one up and send it to you.