XPS Boot From USB

pebbly said:

Alzar, if you can enter the bios,load the bios defaults, if that does not work do you have access to a desktop pc that you could place the laptop hdd in( provided it has a spare sata connection) and reformat the hdd , as a last resort you can always power up the laptop and press the "end" key at the same time that will do a factory reset of the bios :)

Thanks, that was able to fix the boot from UBS issue, now it appears in the list of bootable drives when you press F12. So far, booting from the USB just restarts the system and it attempts to boot from the USB again, which makes it restart.....it's a continous loop. I'll make sure I correclty made the USB into bootable Win 7.

Thanks again. One problem down, many more to go.

Amazing, I managed to reboot my system and reinstall the OS after wiping the drive. Ya, I lost all my files but it's ok, not the first time. Everything is working smoothly. Thanks to everyone for their tips and kudos to Pebbly for all the help.

Alzar said:

I managed to screw up my hard drive using ptedit32.exe while trying to remove the security partition on a flash drive. I was successful in doing so but I managed to copy the table code over to the HDD as well and now my computer believes its hard drive is a 4GB flash drive.

I attempted to reboot the system with a Windows 7 bootable USB, but my XPS M1530 will not recognize the device. When starting up the system, I pressed F12 to choose the device to boot from and the USB HDD did not appear. There isn't much I can do with my laptop right now to change any settings other than the BIOS.

If that isn't enough, my optical drive is completely shot and hasn't worked for a year now, I assume the hardware is the issue. This is a problem cause I was planning on putting in an old Win XP CD if all else failed and worked my way up from there. If anyone has any sort of ideas (other than pressing F12 and choosing USB) I'd be glad to hear it.

EDIT: What happens after I power up: Dell Splash screen followed by a black screen "No bootable devices". The only thing I can do is run an onboard diagnostics which turns up nothing and enter BIOS.


-Alex

It sounds like you've somehow managed to screw up the master boot record... which is a small table at sector 0 that describes the hard disk.

On your bootable USB you should have a folder named BOOT...

If you open that folder in a Command Shell and type bootsect c: /mbr it just might fix your problem.

Alzar said:

pebbly said:

Alzar, if you can enter the bios,load the bios defaults, if that does not work do you have access to a desktop pc that you could place the laptop hdd in( provided it has a spare sata connection) and reformat the hdd , as a last resort you can always power up the laptop and press the "end" key at the same time that will do a factory reset of the bios :)

Thanks, that was able to fix the boot from UBS issue, now it appears in the list of bootable drives when you press F12. So far, booting from the USB just restarts the system and it attempts to boot from the USB again, which makes it restart.....it's a continous loop. I'll make sure I correclty made the USB into bootable Win 7.

Thanks again. One problem down, many more to go.

When you boot from USB __DO NOT__ set USB as the first drive in your BIOS boot order. That's why it's looping on you.

pebbly said:

have you the latest bios ? also ensure you have it set to enable boot from usb , im sure you will already have this link but i will post it just in case Drivers & Downloads :)

Why would he update his BIOS?

Completely ignoring the fact that Flashing stuff is a procedure that can --and does-- fail leaving the equipment useless, the thing was working before he made the mistake that killed it. There's no reason to update ANYTHING... he just needs to clean up the mess he made.