DELL Inspiron 15R (5010) Recovery Issue

I hope someone here has some insight into what is going on with my Inspiron 15R (Model 5010) and possibly some suggestions overcome this problem. Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to provide as much information as possible. I did perform a search for answers and unless I missed it, I didn’t find a similar problem.

 

Background: I purchased this DELL Inspiron 15R new from DELL in 2011 and it came with Windows 7 Home Premium. Last year, when the free Windows 10 upgrade was available for this Laptop I decided to try it, knowing that I would probably have an issue with the Bluetooth capability. As it turns out, Bluetooth partially worked, but I lost the availability of my LAN card. So, I decided to use the Windows 10 feature that allowed me to go back to Windows 7 within the initial 30 day period. The rollback created numerous problems (couldn’t uninstall or update some programs, some USB ports didn’t work, and other issues) that I’ve lived with, but finally decided to restore my laptop using the Recovery DVD I created when I received the laptop from DELL. I didn’t restore from the partition because I wasn’t sure if it had been corrupted during the Windows 7 to 10 and back to 7 processes.

 

Recovery: The recovery from my Recovery DVD seemed to go flawlessly. It went through the recovery process, restarted the laptop and Windows 7 launched and I proceeded through the setup. I checked the System Properties and Windows was activated. Knowing that there would be lots of updates, I ran Windows Update, installed the first wave of updates, clicked on the necessary restart, the computer restarted, the DELL Startup Screen displayed as expected, and then the a failure dialog screen appeared. I’ve performed the Recovery about 10 times, with and without installing updates, and it always goes through the Recovery, restart, and first time setup; but whenever you restart the laptop or perform a shutdown/power on sequence, the same failure occurs. I even created a new USB Recovery Stick from the current Recovery Partition and the same thing happens. It is like a program that you’ve loaded from DVD, but when you try to change it, it looks for some non-existent server somewhere.

 

The laptop is as I received it from DELL, no hardware changes and no BIOS updates. And, after I perform a Recovery, everything works perfectly until I restart or shutdown/power on the laptop. It is interesting that after the Recovery and it restarts the computer to launch and setup Windows the first time; it goes through the DELL Startup Screen and launches Windows; but the next time and all subsequent times it fails after the DELL Startup Screen displays and seems to complete.

 

When starting the laptop; F2 (Setup) and F12 (Boot Options) take me to the expected menus, but F8 has no effect and it just goes to the error screen.

 

I went into the BIOS and checked the list of boot devices and found it interesting that a Diskette was listed as 1st Priority, so I changed 1st Priority to Hard Drive and moved Diskette to the lowest (6th) priority; but that didn’t make any difference. I even performed a BIOS reset to default settings, but that didn’t make any difference either. It should be noted that the BIOS Version is A12 and I think A15 is available, but everything worked fine before with A12.

 

Here is the error screen that appears after the DELL Startup Screen.

 

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:

 

1. Insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer.

2. Choose your language settings, and then click “Next.”

3. Click “repair your computer.”

 

If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.

 

Status:0xc000000e

 

Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.