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
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