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Can't start or restore Dell PC
My wife's Dell Inspiron PC was performing extremely slowly and the HD light was always on. Here is the steps I had taken to attempt to resolve the issue:
-Performed a clean boot
-Tried to restore to a restore point (it said there where no restore points)
-Chkdsk /r (took 72 hours to complete and found what seemed to be a lot of errors)
-Performed factory system restore. I received a message that said that the HD was not compatable with this feature and that I must have a HD with GB of storage. There where no numbers before the "GB" in the message, I would have expected the error message to be indicating that the HD had to be a specific size.
I was able to get the computer to enter into safe mode, however, if I tried to open a program such as cmd, or msconfig I just got the blue spinning wheel for eternity.
Now the computer won't boot at all. It gets to the point where I see a mouse pointer on the screen with the blue spinning wheel but after about 15 mins the HD light just blinks and it will not go any further.
My suspicion is hard drive failure, but I wanted to explore any additional options before purchasing a new HD. I have the Dell recovery disks if that is helpful.
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!