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Windows 7 Home Premium - No OS Listed on CD Boot
Dell Inspiron M5030 laptop. I see no indication on the chassis windows of just what bit version this is, and entering the service tag in Dell's webpage only gives me a choice of 32 or 64 when looking for drivers.
Normal booting gets me as far as 'Starting Windows'. I see the 4 colored balls coming together to make the Windows logo. And that's a far as it goes. No further. And no error.
Starting with a disk, either 64 or 32 bit W7HP reveals no OS listed. Continuing to the diagnostic screen - Startup Repair could not fix the problem. Choosing System Restore yields an error screen stating that 'To use System restore, you must specify which Windows installation to restore.' Obviously this tool is not smart enough to know that it showed me no operating system to restore.
Command Prompt won't let me off the X: drive. When I type C: I get 'The device is not ready'. Typing sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows gives me 'Windows Resource Protection could not start the repair service'.
The memory diagnostic wants me to restart the computer and check for problems. If I can't get past 'Starting Windows', the memory diagnostic is useless.
What are my options? This worked just fine until 2 days ago.