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Dell System Recovery Disks not working (Inspiron 17R N7010) Win 7 Home
The CD/DVD drive is first in the boot sequence. When I start the computer with the System Recovery Disk 1 of 2 in The DVD-Rom, the machine goes immediately into a loop: Dell splash screen for a second or two, followed by a 15-20-second blinking cursor in the upper left corner, followed by a "Windows is loading files" message with a progress indicator moving across the screen. When the progress indicator reaches the end, the initial Dell splash screen appears and the cycle repeats--endlessly.
Background: a couple of weeks ago, I performed diagnostics on the machine (start button - maintenance folder). The exhaustive process indicated that the hard drive was bad and that 1 of the 2 memory sticks was bad: Dimm B. I already had the system recovery disks (2), so I ordered a new hard drive and 8 gb replacement memory (2 4 gb sticks). Both the hard drive and memory installed easily.
I can interrupt the loop early on by pressing F8, as some threads have suggested. But I can find no "repair" option--just the usual three "safe mode"starts, the "start windows normally" option, and a few other options. When I tried safe mode, the usual list of drivers scrolled down the screen, but the machine quickly slipped back into the cycle I described above when the "safe mode" scroll list ended.
I don't know what the parameters of the recovery system Discs are in terms of their ability to initialize and format a new hard drive. I suppose most of the time the discs are used to reset an existing drive. Perhaps I took too much for granted, with respect to their working with a new, non-formatted drive.
The BIOS correctly identifies the hard drive by name, size, and model number. Can it still be a hard drive initialization issue? I've installed numerous new hard drives and memory sticks in much more accessible desktop computers, but this is my first notebook.
This is obviously still a non-formatted, possibly non-initialized hard drive; but the machine displays no error messages whatsoever--nothing pointing to a problem with any hardware, nor does it prompt me to do anything. Just the loop. I've let it go for 90 minutes.
Sorry about the length of this post. I hope I'm overlooking something very simple. Any help would be appreciated.
forager1945
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October 6th, 2015 11:00
After posting, I ran Diagnostics (F12). The first few components passed (up through CD) and then the first phase of the memory test stopped after about a minute, when the screen turned black (no diagnostic error messages--audible or textual). Then the cycle with the blinking cursor started.
Hopefully, I'll get some responses.
In the interim, I'll try to rule out the new hardware as the problem by re-installing the memory (the 1 good chip) and/or the old hard drive, which has only the factory settings on it . Before uninstalling the old hard drive, I ran system recovery from the computer (not the recovery disks), because I wanted to burn recovery disks for the new installation. At the time, I did not have any. That process went well. Also, after running system recovery from the computer, the OS booted properly. However, when I ran diagnostics (f12) from the newly system-recovered hard drive (not from the new recovery disks), I received the same error messages for the drive and memory. Up to a point, the old hard drive should work.
First, I'll swap the new hard drive with the old, leaving the new memory in place, then run the diagnostics--all this is predicated, however, on the old hard drive booting up. If it boots and the new memory passes diagnostics, I'll post the results. If I get the problematic cycle, I'll then reinstall the one good memory stick. If that fails,....I'll post to the forum. If anyone has any ideas in the meantime, please let me know. Thanks.