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August 10th, 2011 03:00
Reinstalling Windows 7 from disc
My laptop (approx 16 months old) started booting up extremely slowly, taking about 45 minutes to fully load up & even then internet explorer would continually 'not respond'. I tried system restore but this continually failed. So I backed up my data & tried to restore to Dell factory settings, this seemly worked however did not remove the slowness. So biting the bullet I decided to open the Re-installation disc and put a new clean version of Windows 7 on the laptop. After a dozen attempts to run the disc, I have had no success, the installation seems to fail at various points. On the 1 occasion that I finally got to the 'completing installation' stage, it failed with the error message 'windows could not configure the system'. I now cannot get onto the laptop without using the disc @ boot up, but cannot get the disc to complete either.
ejn63
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August 10th, 2011 04:00
Sounds like you have a bad hard drive. F12 at powerup - run the Dell diagnostics extended test on it.
Philip_Yip
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August 10th, 2011 04:00
Power down the system, press F12 at startup. Select the diagnostics and run the extended ones particular on the harddrive, incase it is going bad.
I have a guide below for reinstalling Windows but seems maybe you have a bad hdd.
Okay I was just beaten to it by ejn haha.
stoatybumper
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August 11th, 2011 05:00
Thanks 4 the tips guys! Ran the hard drive diagnostics & it looks like the hard drive has indeed failed! Now 2 work out the cheapest solution!
Travis299
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August 11th, 2011 07:00
I used your guide to re-install W7 PRO and it was absolutely excellent in that it saved me considerable time and frustration as my copy of W7 was a large .ISO file. Thanks
Philip_Yip
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August 12th, 2011 02:00
You will need to buy a new hard drive. They can be found in any computer store pretty much or bought online. Note you may wish to attempt data recovery first via booting with a linux distribution such as fedora on a USB stick and copying files over (from windows.old possibily or documents if still there) using an external hard drive.
Note a computer shop may charge you like $20 for fitting and $60 for the part.
However fitting is easy, refer to the service manual here all it is, is a small handful of screws (~4). 2 securing a caddy (piece of plastic for protecting/pulling the hard drive out of the laptop) to the hard drive and 2 securing the caddy or hard drive to the computer.
• Remove 2 screws attaching harddrive to laptop.
• Slide hard drive out of the laptop.
• Remove 2 (or more screws) that attach the caddy to the hard drive.
• Remove caddy from the old hard drive.
• Attach the caddy to the new hard drive and tighten the screws.
• Slide the new hard drive (with caddy) into the laptop.
• Tighten screws.
• Smash old hard drive with a hammer and bin.
You may buy the part direct from Dell. Or just note that it is a 2.5" laptop SATA hard drive and look at amazon. If amazon is far cheaper then I would go with amazon, if it is almost the same price as the Dell website, I would go for the Dell website. Usually amazon is cheaper in the U.K.
The U.S. cost direct from Dell seems actually quite good, unlike in the past where it was a bad move buying upgrade parts direct from Dell as they could be at least double the price. e.g. here vs here (in the U.S. ~$65 for 500 GB) with amazon being only $5 cheaper.
Once you have fitted the hard drive, you will need to use the guide below for installing Windows 7, if you have the Dell Windows 7 reinstallation DVD you will not need to download the .iso files and instead can use that directly. In your case start from Step 4 as there is no data to recover on an empty hard drive & naturally Step 11. won't apply. If using the Dell discs Activation (Step 8) should not be required but is worth a check to see that windows is activated just in case.
Glad the guide was of use to you Travis. :)