My son's Inspiron 5721 got stuck in a boot cycle going from the Dell post screen (the Dell logo screen with loading bar), to Windows logo, to only spinning dots and the bottom of the screen with no logo, to black screen, back to Dell post screen in an endless loop. I fear he may have interrupted a recent Windows update and corrupted his system. Bios and hardware seem to be fine since I can load a Windows 10 portable from USB. He doesn't have any important files on it and all his programs can be restored from the cloud so I figured a Windows reset should do the trick.
WRONG!!!
Let me just say that I just spent a week and a half troubleshooting two different other computers here and had to refresh Windows 10 on my HP laptop and that was a breeze compared to this. I'm at my wits end and taking a time out to post here and wait else I just may take a sledgehammer to the Dell. Let me explain and you'll understand:
FIRST I tried running a Windows repair and then installs from both a DVD and USB, and none of it worked. Startup diagnostics found issues but couldn't fix them. Windows refused to install and gave me a message that what I was trying to accomplish required booting the original installation first. (Wait! What?!! Seriously????)
NEXT I tried downloading the Dell OS recovery tool. Spent over half an hour trying to find the service tag and finally out of sheer luck decided to check the BIOS screen where it did show up. Good thing too because that's the only screen I can get into other than boot screen (F12), which is how i got into the DVD and USB IOS's earlier. Popped the service tag into the OS recovery tool which politely posted in red letters:
No OS images defined for the product.
BEAUTY!!!!
Great, so now what?
WRONG!!!
Let me just say that I just spent a week and a half troubleshooting two different other computers here and had to refresh Windows 10 on my HP laptop and that was a breeze compared to this. I'm at my wits end and taking a time out to post here and wait else I just may take a sledgehammer to the Dell. Let me explain and you'll understand:
FIRST I tried running a Windows repair and then installs from both a DVD and USB, and none of it worked. Startup diagnostics found issues but couldn't fix them. Windows refused to install and gave me a message that what I was trying to accomplish required booting the original installation first. (Wait! What?!! Seriously????)
NEXT I tried downloading the Dell OS recovery tool. Spent over half an hour trying to find the service tag and finally out of sheer luck decided to check the BIOS screen where it did show up. Good thing too because that's the only screen I can get into other than boot screen (F12), which is how i got into the DVD and USB IOS's earlier. Popped the service tag into the OS recovery tool which politely posted in red letters:
No OS images defined for the product.
BEAUTY!!!!
Great, so now what?