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NFT: Dell Inspiron 15 not working anymore!

spike : 8/28/2015 3:55 pm
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?


Do you have the windows DVD? You should be able to boot from that  
BeerFridge : 8/28/2015 4:06 pm : link
sounds like your drive got corrupted.
RE: Do you have the windows DVD? You should be able to boot from that  
spike : 8/28/2015 4:06 pm : link
In comment 12440348 BeerFridge said:
Quote:
sounds like your drive got corrupted.


nope. it didnt come with a win dvd when purchased
Have you tried  
fivehead : 8/28/2015 4:16 pm : link
hitting CTRL+F11 at boot? There may be a recovery partition on you hard drive.
RE: Have you tried  
spike : 8/28/2015 4:16 pm : link
In comment 12440360 fivehead said:
Quote:
hitting CTRL+F11 at boot? There may be a recovery partition on you hard drive.


gonna try now
RE: RE: Do you have the windows DVD? You should be able to boot from that  
Jim in Fairfax : 8/28/2015 4:18 pm : link
In comment 12440350 spike said:
Quote:
In comment 12440348 BeerFridge said:


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.
Or you can try  
fivehead : 8/28/2015 4:18 pm : link
F8 at boot.

Those are just a couple of things that popped up when I Googled "Dell recovery partition".
Here's a link to a request for factory recovery media  
BeerFridge : 8/28/2015 4:21 pm : link
And here's one for instructions about what to do with it.

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 )
This is our secondary laptop  
spike : 8/28/2015 4:28 pm : link
and we don't have anything person saved on it, but we sure like to have it function again!
Your Dell Inspiron  
Scott in Seattle : 8/29/2015 1:40 am : link
I deal with a lot of Inspirons and Latitudes (I run an IT department). It sounds like either the boot partition of your hard drive got corrupted or the hard drive just died. If I were a betting man, I'd pick the latter. A lot of the Inspiron 15s come with Seagate 320 or 500 GB drives in them, and I've seen a boatload of these fail in the last couple of years. I'm not quite sure what has happened to Seagate - their drives used to be just fine - but now if you look at hard drive reviews, you'll find a lot of horror stories in regard to Seagate drives over the last few years. Their failure rates have skyrocketed and are now much higher than Western Digital and HGST, their main competitors.

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.

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