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April 4th, 2019 13:00
Repair Win 10 MBR?
Hi Forum Folks,
Stepped squarely in it this time!
5755. Out of warranty. Came as Win10 only. Went to set it up as a dual-boot with Linux, and got zero help from Dell Support. Managed to do it anyway (thanks, Dell....) and it's been running just fine for over a year, til today.
Was tooling around in Win10, when it suddenly became almost completely unresponsive... took forever to load a webpage, or pull up an app. Then I'm getting bombarded with popup windows telling me about add-on and plug-in crashes. The hard drive light is on solid (I can hear/feel the disk spinning like mad). Worrying about a virus or malware or what have you, I tried killing the network connection, but that was unresponsive too. Tried to pull up the 'Start' menu... no joy there either. Tried CTRL-ALT-DEL, but again, no response. Getting desperate at this point, I pulled both the AC adapter AND the battery. That stopped it alright!
Trouble is, now it won't boot into Win10 at all. Being dual-boot, I get to the "Grub" screen, select Win10, and get nothing but a black, dead screen; no cursor, no little whirligig dots... nothing. For a very long time. Linux boots just fine from the same place. Tried booting into one of the recovery discs the thing prompted me to burn when I first got it... result is the same: dead black screen
Thank the powers that be that I ignored Dell's direction that I not turn it into a dual-boot, otherwise I wouldn't be here right now.
I'm fairly certain I've managed to trash the MBR; I understand that this is a not-unheard-of result of improper shutdowns... and they don't come much more improper than this one was. I'm in the middle of downloading a recovery image and some sort of recovery tool from Dell; no idea how that's going to pan out. Most of the stuff I've been able to find assumes that you can boot into Windows, at least into Safe mode, but I don't get even that far. So most of that advice is useless in this instance. I'd appreciate anyone's input on what course of action I ought to pursue, or from anyone who has managed to recover from a similar situation. Thanks in advance!!


JOcean
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April 4th, 2019 19:00
Try the following.
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/repair-master-boot-record-mbr-windows
Saltgrass
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April 4th, 2019 20:00
I don't know what you think MBR is but win 10 does not use it...