Solved Dell Inspiron 1545 not booting any drives.

[sillyginger]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit installed. Now after a windows update, whenever I try to boot, it goes through the Dell logo then I get a black screen with this in the top left corner "Error!_" I tried to see if it was the harddrive by using F12 to boot linux from a flash drive, but I get the exact same screen. I feel like the problem may be with the pre-boot environment but I am not sure and don't know how to fix it. Also, I have run a test through the BIOS and came up with no errors. Any help is appreciated .

 

[Kaktussoft]

Can you (try) boot from some bootable DVD? Same error immediately?

 

[Kaktussoft]

Goto BIOS and set the BOOT Devices to boot from USB only (temporary) and try to boot from usb stick.
Same error? And what error if usb stick is not attached?

"Error!_"
is the EXACT error?

 

[sillyginger]

I went and changed the boot sequence so the drive with linux goes first, and now it is booting up linux. The error exactly is Error!_

 

[Kaktussoft]

I went and changed the boot sequence so the drive with linux goes first, and now it is booting up linux. The error exactly is Error!_

Do I understand right ... booting from linux DVD works perfectly?

 

[Kaktussoft]

When booting (activate boot from usb only in BIOS, to be sure it tries to boot from usb!) from usb you get the error. But what if usb isn't attached?

 

[centaur78]

hi

Are you able to boot to safeboot.... if now try a startup repair using a widows Disc.

 

[sillyginger]

yes the linux drive works fine. I found a fix. From the bootable linux, I resized my windows partition, and installed linux to the same hard drive. Now, I have the grub bootloader, so I can select windows 7 from that and it loads fine now. Thanks for all the input from everybody.

 

[Kaktussoft]

yes the linux drive works fine. I found a fix. From the bootable linux, I resized my windows partition, and installed linux to the same hard drive. Now, I have the grub bootloader, so I can select windows 7 from that and it loads fine now. Thanks for all the input from everybody.

So it was a problem with harddisk?! But you told me it gave the same error when booting from usb!

 

[Kaktussoft]

Where has grub been installed? In MBR, in bootsector of windows partition, in bootsector of linux partition?

 

[Kaktussoft]

Please post screenshot of diskmanagement with all fields visible.
And your grub config file if you know where to find it