Out of options: Trying to restore a inspiron 1546

El Nacho

Noobie Cheese
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
Messages
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I had a friend drop off their inspiron 1546 laptop to fix after it got infected with a virus. Laptop boots up to "a disk read error occurred". First thought is hosed MBR or something similar. Grabbed a linux boot cd and backup all the personal data and then go to preform a factory restore.

First issue comes up. I can't access the dell system restore. Try everything I can find online. ctrl-f11, f8, f5. no go.

Confirm restore partition is still on the laptop.

use boot cd to force the recover partition to load. Tells me it can't find the c: drive. Run check disk and every other HDD check i have and nothing shows up wrong.

next step :confused::confused:
 
HDD might be going bad.

Find or DL a Dell CD/DVD for the version of Windows they have and install it.
 
that was my thought also, but wouldn't that show up in check disk or something else? I had no issues accessing the data through linux or windows.

with the way windows keys work now, do I need an OEM copy or will a retail one work if I have the key from the laptop?

EDIT: laptop has windows 7
 
with the way windows keys work now, do I need an OEM copy or will a retail one work if I have the key from the laptop?

EDIT: laptop has windows 7

OEM keys require an OEM copy of Windows. However, the OEM license key can work on 32-bit and 64-bit OEM versions of Windows provided that you're using the same "edition" of Windows that was originally installed (e.g., Home Premium)
 
did another HDD scan. Nothing came back. Going to try a repair with my windows 7 disk and see what happens.
 
never could get the dell restore to work. 3rd try at using repair feature off the install disk worked though
 
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