Inspiron 15R SE 7520 Windows re-install misery

A friend bought this; she thinks it came with Windows 8 or 8.1, but isn't sure.  At some point she upgraded to Windows 10.

Now:

• Windows won't boot
• Recovery isn't working
• She never made a recovery DVD or flash drive
• I can't download a recovery image because "Recovery image not available for your Service Tag."

So I had her call dell and order recovery media, which in this case is a USB stick.  I can boot, and it goes through several steps (checking disk, etc), then gets "Initialize Backup and Migration."

It displays this error:Deploy_JukeBox.exe - Application Error

Here's a closeup:

Close-up of error message

If I click OK (or click the X in the corner of the Window), the system reboots.

I can't click Continue because continue is greyed-out.  There is a "skip" button, but it doesn't work.

Something I read said this problem is because it's trying to backup the data, but there's no available USB drive for backup.  So I tried again with an empty NTFS-formated USB drive, but it showed the same error.

I don't have another Windows PC available, so I can't run any Windows tools.  (I do have a Mac available, so I can probably burn an ISO image to a flash drive, but I tried that with a Windows 10 OEM ISO, and it got stuck in a reboot cycle.

Please, Help!