Will Not Boot Even With Disc

jumanji said:

If you could access and read the HDD on another PC, I would say that the HDD itself is OK.

What is left for you is to try it in its original location - the Dell Tower -with another SATA Cable and another port. If it wouldn't boot still then most probably the motherboard is faulty.

Try with another HDD and with the good HDD also it exhibits the same problem, it would confirm the motherboard is defective.

Contact DELL support and check whether they would undertake motherboard repair.If not another professional service agency.

Okay.... I disconnected my friend's drive from a working tower where it had been set up as a slave drive. I disconnected the good drive from that working tower, connected my friend's drive as the primary, inserted the W7 Home disc and booted.

Selecting repair did give me the System Recovery Options page and the Windows 7 OS did display. This page did not display when I used the disc in his tower. I clicked on the OS and it took me to that repair screen (Windows could not start, etc). The repair has been running for about an hour so far.

While that continued to run, I took my good drive and connected to my friend's tower and started it. It booted successfully, bringing me to my Windows password entry screen. I assume that means that the mobo on my friend's tower is okay.

Meanwhile, my friend's drive in my computer 'finished' its repair, telling me that Windows could not automatically repair this computer (or something like that). I hit the advance options, went to the command prompt, and am now running chkdsk /r /f

The chkdsk on my friend's drive (in my tower) finally finished. In stage 3, I was told it was Repairing the USN Journal File record segment. Nothing through stages 4 & 5, but at the end it said Adding 703 bad clusters to the Bad Cluster file, Correcting error in Volume Bitmap and Windows had made corrections to the file system.

I put the drives back into their proper towers and everything now works. Thanks, guys.

jumanji said:

It is really strange that that HDD would not boot from the optical media in your friend's tower but could do so on your tower to carry out any repairs. And check disk did repair it.

I found that incredibly strange as well. I have several 64 bit Windows 7 Home discs and I tried all of them. I tried a different SATA connector, and a different data cable. No luck with any of them.

jumanji said:

I am not sure what lesson we have to learn from this :).

That computers are sentient beings with a warped sense of humor. Or else they're just spiteful bastards.

jumanji said:

In any case, run the manufacturer's diagnostic/repair utility on the HDD and check its health to make sure it is healthy.

Will run the Dell utility.