Dell Backup & Recovery stuck after failed Windows 7 re-installation

alfaalfa · 22 May 2016

Hello everyone! Sadly my first post here is written under pretty bad circumstances.

I am one of the many people whose systems (in my case a Precision 15 5510) were "automatically" upgraded to Windows 10 without warning, as Microsoft changed the status of Windows 10 from an 'optional update' to that of a 'reccommended update'.

After the installation completed, I was presented with the EULA and selected the 'decline' option and Windows notified me that if I continue with this option it will 'attempt to re-install Windows 7' so I did that. After supposedly re-installing Windows 7, my system restarted and booted with the Windows 7 logo but before the login screen appeared I got a blue screen and the laptop restarted. This subsequently happened every time I attempted to start my laptop, except for when I tried to boot in safe mode (which it did successfully).

I restarted the laptop, pressed F8 and selected the Repair option and the Dell Backup and Recovery option after that. I selected the drive I want to backup (C:) from the menu and was notified to insert a Flash Drive or a SD card that has more than 43GB free. I inserted a 64 GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive (SanDisk Extreme, which is meant to be really fast) and clicked 'Next'. Dell Backup and Recovery has since been stuck on the next screen which says "Backing up your data and Dell Backup and Recovery settings" with the progress bar just flashing by rather than actually showing any progress. This has been happening for the last 4-5 hours.

Any ideas what is happening and what I should do/what my options are?

In case it helps this is my set-up:

Dell Precision M5510
CPU: Core i7 6820HQ (2.70GHz)
Hard Drives: 256GB M.2 SSD + 1TB 5400RPM
RAM:16GB DDR4 - 2133MHz

All help is appreciated! Many thanks.

P.S. I already posted this in the Dell Forums but have received no replies, so I thought I'd try here.

fireberd · 23 May 2016

On older Dell's, if some other OS was installed or an attempt to install (changes the MBR on the hard drive) the Dell recovery partition is no longer valid and the only way to reinstall is to do a clean install with a OS disc. Sadly, this sounds like what is happening to your system.

I have also seen cases of the Win 10 upgrade deleting/corrupting user data, which may also be an issue.

The Dell forum is mostly users helping users (I used to be part of it until I sold my Dell) like this forum, so how long it takes to get a response will vary.