Win 7 Home Premium OS not found in Dell XPS 15

Hi,

I recently bought a Dell XPS 15 L502X Laptop which has Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit OS.
It was having only one drive and tried to make a partition.
Without knowing the consequences i clicked the Mark Partition as Active in the Disk Management. Next time when i restart the computer. It showed BootMgr is missing.
So i could not get into Win 7.
So i tried using the Dell Data Safe Local Recovery disc which i created (Unfortunately i did not realise it is not complete and i burnt only one disc).
I chose the option reinstall So it asks for the supplementary disc Insert Disk 2 which i dont have.

Now when i start it shows Operating system not found.

Not able to use the F8 key also.

I desperately need a solution.

Any help to restore my laptop to factory settings would be much appreciated.

Thanks and regards,
Thiru

Thiru23 said:

Hi,

I recently bought a Dell XPS 15 L502X Laptop which has Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit OS.
It was having only one drive and tried to make a partition.
Without knowing the consequences i clicked the Mark Partition as Active in the Disk Management. Next time when i restart the computer. It showed BootMgr is missing.
So i could not get into Win 7.
So i tried using the Dell Data Safe Local Recovery disc which i created (Unfortunately i did not realise it is not complete and i burnt only one disc).
I chose the option reinstall So it asks for the supplementary disc Insert Disk 2 which i dont have.

Now when i start it shows Operating system not found.

Not able to use the F8 key also.

I desperately need a solution.

Any help to restore my laptop to factory settings would be much appreciated.

Thanks and regards,
Thiru

Hi there
this is something that SHOULD BE OUTLAWED -- I HATE THESE "HIDDEN PARTITION" OS installs / backups -- the O/S should ALWAYS be made available via separate media -- if the PC doesn't have a CD then the software should be supplied on a USB stick -- these are cheap enough these days even compared to the price of a CHEAP PC.

I'm sure you can get a replacement disk from DELL.

However all might not be lost yet --- if you didn't actually delete any data then you can fix this provided you have access to another computer.

Download a copy of GPARTED or a similar partition manager - GPARTED is fine normally.
Burn the ISO to a CD / DVD -- your choice -- a re-writable one is fine - then you can re-use the medium again if you want. You can also create a bootable USB too if you don't have a DVD drive.

Boot your DELL machine from the GPARTED disk.

Change the Active partition to just Primary.
Change the Boot (small partition) to Active -- Don't confuse the Hidden partition with the BOOT partition -- GPARTED will usually show you which is a Bootable partition.

Re-boot -- should work fine.

If your DELL doesn't have a CD / DVD GPARTED can boot from a USB stick too.

Cheers
jimbo

If you ran the first disk of your Recovery Disk set then it might have already overwritten the C drive. If not, boot free Partition Wizard bootable CD to mark Win7 partition active, then boot the WIn7 Repair CD to run three separate Startup Repairs with reboots until Win7 starts.

If you already overwrote your Win7 partition, then try running Factory Recovery from boot by tapping the hotkey: Dell Restoring Your Computer´s Software to the Factory Settings

IF this fails, try booting back in with Partition Wizard to set the Recovery Partition active, then see if it boots on its own, or will respond to the hotkey being tapped at boot.

If all else fails, order your Dell Recovery Disks for Dell tech support, or find a Win7 installer for your version to follow these Clean Reinstall steps