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Reformat failed, computer won't boot at all or reformat, help!
I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. I decided to reformat my computer today after a battle with a virus. The computer was working fine, but I wanted to make sure the virus was compleely gone. I have reformatted many times and took the same steps I always do, Ctl F11, agreed to erase and continue, etc. When I was told to continue, instead of my computer reformatting smoothly, I was given an error saying that it could not be completed and a black screen saying only that an error occured and to hit Ctl + Alt + Dlt to restart my computer. When doing this, I was brought back to the same black screen asking to restart. I can't get past this screen. I tried to restart the reformat again and it won't alow me to. I have no idea what happened or how to complete the restore. Can somebody help? I don't know what went wrong or how to fix it. I'm completely panicking about this right now. Thank you!!
Jim Coates
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November 11th, 2008 10:00
If you are pressing Ctrl + F11 during the restart process then you must be using Dell's PC Restore for XP. PC Restore is an image of your original factory-installed operating system, drivers and configuration, 'hidden' on a separate partition of the hard drive. I wonder if the partition could have become damaged (bad sectors on the hard drive, failing hard drive, etc )?
I think you ought to post your question on another board on the Dell Forum, either the Windows board or a hard drive board, to get advanced help. I feel for you, because I had just finished reformatting and reinstalling XP on my aged Inspiron 1100 this morning. It was the first time I had ever done it on this computer and I was so worried about something going wrong. I spent days doing backups and taking notes on configuration settings, etc. Happy to say it all went well.
My computer was made before Dell started including PC Restore, so I restored mine from the XP installation disk and the Resources disk. If you are unable to get PC Restore to work, you can get the disks from Dell if you are the original owner of the computer. Good luck with it.
Jim