Hi All,
A big thanks to all the experts for extending quick and useful help for resolving my problem.
Firstly, I forgot to inform at the start of this thread that my laptop battery has worn out and its not charging 100%. I guess that's how the problem started, since there were quite a few times when I forgot to power the laptop through the main power supply and the battery would quickly go down, in the process damaging the hard-drive. I am not sure if poor battery damages the hard-drive, so would like the experts to comment on this as it would help others who are reading this post with similar problem.
Also I forgot to mention that my laptop was a dual-boot system i.e. Win 7 Home Basic + Ubuntu, which means the bootloader was of Ubuntu. Really sorry for missing out on that info.
Steps taken to solve my problem:
1. The first thing you worry about when any electronic device crashes is your data
. So using the
Ubuntu live USB, I was able to access my hard-drive and quickly backed-up all my personal data.
2. Then I used the Ubuntu disk utility to check if my hard-drive had indeed failed. It showed that there
were 4 bad sectors but there was no way of correcting those.
3. Next I tried to use the Dell Factory Restore option to format windows but it did not work.
4. Before taking the drastic step of replacing the hard-drive I tried doing a clean install of windows, thus I
used the Win 7 installable USB to do a clean install of Windows on the same hard-drive as suggested by Kari & Sandeep in the earlier posts which were really helpful.
5. During installation, when I reached the step of creating partitions, I deleted all the partitions and just
wanted to create 2 partitions, one for windows & other for data, but somehow I could not delete one
partition which might have those bad sectors I guess (though I'm not sure about it). Thus out of the original 500GB hard-drive, now I could use only 240GB & the remaining 260GB got wasted. I guess another reason could be that, Linux uses the "ext" file system while Windows uses the "FAT" or "NTFS" file system, and Linux has the capability to read windows file system but windows cannot understand Linux's file
system. So I think the windows installation USB could not delete the partition in which Linux was
residing. But then I had only assigned around 10GB for Ubuntu when I had installed it originally. Then how come my 260GB of hard-drive space got wasted!? Really confused & illiterate about this behavior, would like the experts to comment on this & clarify.
6. Anyway, I was happy to get the remaining 240GB space, where I created 2 partitions of 60 & 180GB
and installed windows 7 Home Basic successfully
7. Now my system is single boot with only windows. Next thing I did was, get my windows registered
using the product key which is mentioned on a sticker on the bottom of the laptop. Would advise
people who are reading this to make a note of the product key since the sticker worns out over time.
Don't know why they don't provide the key in a better way. Maybe coz of piracy issues.
8. Installed all the recommended drivers for my laptop.
9. Installed all the windows updates available.
10. Installed Microsoft Security Essentials which I think is a good enough defence against any malicious
attacks, as per the posts which I have read on sevenforums. Again would like experts to comment on
this.
11. Installed all the applications using the backed-up data.
And now I am typing this post from my laptop which came back to life yesterday
Experts, please answer my queries above if you have time.
Would again like to thank all the experts who are helping so many people around the world to solve their problems.
Keep up the good work guys!!
Cheers!!
