Originally Posted by
DanRSturbo
Your fucked without an install disc really, when it starts there will be press f2 to enter setup, then there may be a screen saying something about doing system recovery
Not entirely 'fucked' just yet...
Press [F2] when you see the DELL logo & the blue bar, to enter the System BIOS. Theres nothing about 'System Recovery' in the BIOS, but you can alter some useful settings to try a few things in here.
Originally Posted by
DanRSturbo
nothing in the BIOS can specify what partition to use, only the hard drive.
Bullshit. Of course you can tell it to boot from another partition via BIOS....
In the 'Boot Sequence' section in the BIOS - you can alter the 'Hard Disk Drives' to tell it which HDD or Partition to boot first. If you're lucky, and theres a secondary recovery partition there, you can tell the BIOS to boot from that rather than the primary partition with the corrupt windows.
Alternatively if it shows no secondary partition in the list, being a dell, (there is another method) try pressing [Ctrl][F11] when you see the dell logo when you first switch it on.
If the hard drive hasn't been messed-with too much and the laptop definately wasn't supplied with recovery CD's, this should fire it into restore mode. BE WARNED THOUGH - if it works, anything you've put on there (programs, music, videos etc...) will be wiped off.
It will also revert to XP or vista depending on what it was supplied with originally.
But to save aggro (now, and in the future)... GET A FUCKING WINDOWS DISC!
