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129452
July 31st, 2014 09:00
Inspiron 11 - 3147 Bios issue
I want to boot from my USB DVD drive so I can clone the installed 5400 rpm hard disk to a 7200 rpm. I called tech support yesterday, they couldn't help, and said I would have to pay for advanced support. I told them that if this is Dell's policy after all the years I have done business with them, I'd prefer to return it for a refund and forget about doing business with Dell. That didn't matter, though, so I hung up.
Does anyone know how to do this without the necessity of re-installing Windows 8.1? I checked Dell Online Support and the most recent BIOS is A01, which came with the machine.
Thanks for your help.
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ejn63
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July 31st, 2014 09:00
In order to boot from the DVD, you must turn off secure boot and boot in legacy mode (F2 at powerup). Remember to change the boot back to UEFI (but don't turn secure boot back on) after cloning.
Also remember that the Dell recovery partition will no longer function after cloning - it is encrypted and the cloning process will break the encryption.
The better way to do this is to have a 16G or larger flash drive. Use the Dell backup and recovery utility on the hard drive to prepare a recovery drive, and then swap drives. Then recover the system to the new hard drive (it will recover both the windows drive AND the recovery partition this way).
Shan Grillah
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June 28th, 2016 10:00
Hey there, I've got a recovery issue and want to boot from an external drive on my Inspiron 11 3147 (possibly the worst laptop ever). I need to reinstall windows 8.1 or even try to recover from the backup I made on my external drive.... but the computer will not go there, it just boots from UEFI. When I change this to legacy it doesn't give me a drive option to boot from... any ideas? Greatly appreciated!