Installing an OS on a Dell XPS

[Tech bud]

I had a customer bring her laptop in to me to have me see what is causing her laptop not to boot.

Its a Dell XPS. All the test run in the beginning and say hardware is fine, I even pull the tb drive and place in docking station and its picking up by another laptop in a docking station.

She doesn't care about data, so I as just going to nuke it with an new install. Boot to usb and install os on her 32 GB SSD. It seems to install as normal, but then I get the Secure Boot message. Never ran into this yet, figure out I have to turn secure boot off in the bios and fast boot.

Now in the Dell bios, there is no real option I can find that says disabled, I only have three options, minimal, thorough or auto. Not sure which one I should be on for off, but did every one. Each install failed.

I tried to install on the other drive to see maybe if the one drive was bad. Same error when I try to boot.

What am I missing that is causing this OS not to Install, is there somewhere I'm not thinking off that might disable fast boot?

 

[Tech bud]

Looks like I was doing it right, I just had to add a new new Master boot device in the Bios and it seemed to boot right up.

 

[Porthos]

#1 The OS does not go on the 32 gig drive. It is a cache drive.

 

[Tech bud]

Ya, figuring that out, I have it on the 1TB, is there any special setup that I would have to do to get that working properly

 

[Porthos]

I yank them and most computers suddenly boot again. I dont bother replacing them unless I can fit a msata with more space on it.

 

[Sky-Knight]

It's a Dell, their website should have downloadable recovery instructions for it, and an image for that platform. Why reinvent the wheel?

 

[Porthos]

It's a Dell, their website should have downloadable recovery instructions for it, and an image for that platform. Why reinvent the wheel?

Still most likely have to replace the 32gig msata drive anyway..

How about a service tag number we could look at.

 

[Tech bud]

I got it running again. I could see the drive in bios. I had to have unsecure boot on, fast boot on thorough, make sure that the BIOS is set to raid. Once installed just downloaded intel smart reponse software. Linked it to the ssd, she is like new. Thanks for all the help though