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  #1  
Old December 11th, 2012, 04:39 AM
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Strider Strider is offline
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Dell hard drive failed; can't restore Windows

Hi all,
I have a Dell Inspiron laptop belonging to a friend of a friend that will not boot. I ran Seatools from a boot CD; the drive failed the short test. We propose to replace the HD, but how do we restore Windows? The owner says that she never received any recovery/restore discs with the computer. The computer had been infected with malware; we disinfected it, but it has no system restore points nor 'last known good configuration' available.
Only a couple of seconds after the Dell logo screen, this error is spawned:
"Status: 0xc000000e
"Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible."
Before running Seatools, the error spawned was the dreaded 7B error: STOP 0x0000007B (0xFFFFF880D99A9928, 0xFFFFFFFFC000000D, 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000)
I tried switching SATA operation from AHCI to ATA and back again in the BIOS.
Forgive me if this has been covered here before; I did search, but found nothing that helped.
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  #2  
Old December 11th, 2012, 06:31 PM
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Murf Murf is offline
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Normally Dell puts the operating system on a "Recovery Partition" on the hard drive. It's a small partition, sometimes hidden. You can purchase recovery CD's from Dell. Boot hit "Ctr" + "F11" key and you should be able to access the recovery partition. However, if the drive is so bad that you can't get there, and as you indicated it failed the test then you would need to replace the drive and use the recovery CD, which you don't have.

What version of Windows? Win 7?
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  #3  
Old December 11th, 2012, 07:04 PM
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Strider Strider is offline
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Thanks, Murf. It's Windows 7. There is in fact a recovery partition on the drive. Before I used the Seatools long test, I could access a menu (via F8, IIRC), with the option to restore the OS to 'new' and keep user data. The routine copied photos, documents, inbox, etc. to folders on the C: drive, but shortly thereafter crashed with an error message something like 'cannot write to location nnnnnn'. I ran Windows memory diagnostic and memtest86; both showed no memory errors.
Looking now at one of the tools on an Ultimate Boot CD, HDClone, trying to decide if we can copy both the normal and hidden partitions to a portable USB drive, then back to a new laptop drive. Do you think that will work?
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Old December 11th, 2012, 08:08 PM
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Murf Murf is offline
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One problem, most PC makers that use a recovery partiton also use a proprietary Master Boot Record, and Partition Boot Records so unless you can clone the entire drive (all partitions) to the new one, just copying the recovery partition to the new drive may not work.

Sometimes full disk cloning does not work either.
However I belive DEll uses a .wim file as the image for the recovery so maybe if you copy it, then use Microsoft's AIK program to restore the partition, not sure never tried it.

Using the Ultimate CD, see if you can rund chkdsk on the drive, sounds like maybe a bad sector with a key Windows file on it.
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Old December 12th, 2012, 05:40 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Murf View Post
Using the Ultimate CD, see if you can rund chkdsk on the drive, sounds like maybe a bad sector with a key Windows file on it.
Thanks, Murf. I agree: the OS is hitting a bad sector and crashing. I couldn't find chkdsk on the UBCD I have
We're going to try to get a restore disc from Dell. Hopefully it will let us restore Windows on a brand new drive.
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