Dell Inspiron 1545 will not install Windows

[scovilletech]

Hello,

Got an Inspiron 1545 that had bad infections and would just boot to blinking curser. I cleaned it up as best I could, but could not fix the MBR. I tested the hard drive with SeaTools and it passed, as well as the onboard Dell diagnostics. I finally resotred to nuke and pave after backing up data, but here's the kicker. Windows 7 Home Premiium fails at 1% of expanding files. I tested my disk in a Virtualbox VM and it works fine, so it's not a bad image, which I got from TechNet. (I know its retail. I'm waiting on the Dell disks to come in as I did not have a copy of Dell Win 7 HP). Thought I'd just throw this on here and see if the key might miracuously activate. It beats doing nothing.

Any ideas on what could be keeping Windows from loading? I have another hard drive coming as I did not have a spare SATA 2.5" to test. Also, maybe I should completely reformat the whole drive, not just the OS partition that was on there? I could not get Ctrl-F11 to boot the recovery partition anyway, so its useless.

Any ideas? What am I missing here?

The laptop would also fail to boot Seatools and a few other tools from UBCD, had to put the drive in my bench PC and run Seatools from there, so that might be a clue to something? The motherboard acts fine in all other aspects, so I don't think that is bad?

Could it be that it needs 64 bit Windows since I am using x86. I would think it would say 64 bit required or something like that and that the cpu would say 64 bit in BIOS, but at least in my experience, you can install x86 on a 64 bit system, just not the other way around.

 

[arrow_runner]

I may have missed it in your post, but have you checked the ram?

 

[cypress]

This is weird, but I had something similar to this around the 4th of the July weekend. Client brought in the same type of laptop model and it was in a reboot loop. Ran diagnostics on Machine and everything came up Fine.

memtest86+ for hours
WD Tool
gSmartcontrol

Anyway, I was able to backup the user information and I thought it may just be a bad drive. So I wiped the Hard drive with DBAN and figured I try to install Windows 7 again just in case. Well, it worked!

What I am saying here is to try and wipe the hard drive completely and then re-install Windows 7 again. Although for my re-install I did have the Dell Windows 7 64 Home Premium Disk.

 

[compnet]

Have you tried another CD? Just because your image is good doesn't mean it burned properly.

Have you tried a USB dvd drive? Bad optical drives get stuck on windows installs.

I agree with testing the ram, but I doubt that's the problem.

I also have suspicions on the hard drive if you can't boot to recovery.

 

[scovilletech]

I did test memtest86+ also for hours and it came back good, no errors.

I used the same CD and tried installing it in a VM on my test bench, different cd drive, and the install worked, so the CD image burned fine.

I did not try DBAN, but will do that next. Also, the dell CD's are coming in today. I threw a small fit in the email back and forth with dell tech support who wanted to give me grief since the system was out of warranty. I told them I was a repair tech and not the end user and just needed the darn disks and that i thought it was BS that they no longer ship disks when the recovery partition could get corrupted. Next thing, I get an email back saying they are sending the disks, so now I'll have a Dell Win 7 HP for future.

Will try completely wiping the drive next.

Thanks!

 

[cypress]

No problem, I hope it works out for you! I was patient with this, and I am glad I was. Because in the end, I didn't want to mis-diagnose the problem to the client.

I did wipe out the all the partitions and re-install fresh on the Hard drive.

 

[ArtemusComputerTechnology]

I agree with Cypress. At times you cannot save them all. Customers\clients may have to start from scratch.

 

[PCX]

Everyone beat me on the ram, but no on meantioned that the CD or DVD drive could be bad . . . try swaping it out or booting from a USB device.