Basically Hosed...

[DylanC]

OK, a friend of a friend wants me to fix her laptop. Right now it will not boot. It posts to BIOS splash screen, goes to boot from HDD1 and stalls at a blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen. F8 will not bring up the boot options menu.

The laptop is a Dell Studion 1555. The girl has no discs or documentation, and there is no CoA on the laptop. I'm not even sure what flavor of Vista the machine is running. There is a recovery partition but I've no idea how to access it without booting windows. In an ideal world, I'd like to recover the OS using the Dell supplied recovery partition but I think the odds are pretty slim that is even possible. Near as I can tell I would need a Windows Repair disc for her exact version of Vista, i.e. Home, Ultimate, etc., 32- or 64-bit, SP0 or SP1, etc. That all seems like too much trouble, but if anyone has ideas, I'm listening.

Option 2 is a complete reformat and reinstall, including a wipe of the recovery partition. This would be simple if the PC had a CoA stuck to the bottom, but it doesn't. So in order for this to work I need to extract the version of vista and the product key from the machine. Also not sure how to do this without getting into windows.

I have booted the laptop using an Ubuntu disk and can access the contents of the main partition. My third option is to just install Ubuntu and give it back to her....

Any ideas? I'm grateful for any help. Maybe Dell can give me some info if I give them the service tag #?

-DylanC

[cluberti]

You might be able to get recovery media:

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kcs/document?c=us&l=en&s=gen&docid=DSN_331556&isLegacy=true

[DylanC]

Cluberti-

Thanks for the link....just filled out the form. I'll post whether it works or not.

[Yzöwl]

One option is to boot from PE optical media, mount the remote registry of the damaged PC and using a vbscript extract the Product Key and Product Name from that registry.

[jaclaz]

Wait a minute.

A flashing cursor is traditionally a problem with either the MBR/partition table or the bootsector.

In other words it is very possible that *nothing* except a handful of bytes in MBR or in the bootsector is wrong (and the actual install/system files are perfectly functional).

If I were you I would boot from CD/DVD or USB and check (and save current MBR and bootsector, so USB would be better).

Parted Magic would do if you don't have a PE of some kind.

Then check status of the disk with TESTDISK, most pobably it can be fixed with no or very little effort.

It is NOT advised to use tools like bootsect.exe, MBRFIX or the like because often laptops have "special" MBR code and by restoring "normal" Vista code you may loose access to the Recovery partition (it greatly depends on the actual OEM, model and what not), DELL used to have a "custom" recovery option, and later they migrated it to the "standard" way):

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/vista/

If you are sure that the PC uses this last approach you can replace allright the MBR code (if damaged) with *any* PE.

If you have a USB stick handy (and the laptop - as I presume - is capable of booting from USB) we could try using grub4dos to boot the laptop bypassing the MBR and bootsector code (of course if the actual data or filesystem is corrupted there is no way).

Another thing that you could attempt doing, once verified MBR and bootsector would be run CHKDSK /R from a recovery console, the normal,. downloadable XP one would do as well on a Vista NTFS.

jaclaz

Edited September 13, 2011 by jaclaz

[DylanC]

jaclaz:

I'm downloading PartedMagic right now. I've used GPartEd before, but I've never used any of the other utilities. Could you please explain with a bit of detail how you would attempt to repair the MBR or boot sector? I have booted using a windows 7 repair CD and run chkdsk /f. First time it found and fixed errors, second time was clean. Haven't run it with the /r switch yet.

Yzowl: This is what I had in mind. I've done this type of thing before using Belarc Advisor, but have no idea how to accomplish in this situation. I'm not a programmer and much prefer GUI tools to command line. Any specific advice on how to accomplish this?

[IcemanND]

Boot from a WinPE cd or thumbdrive and you can use my keydecoder to extract the vista key from the install if the registry is still readable.

But Jaclaz is right that is normally a boot record/sector issue. See it a lot on Lenovo laptops that have a custom boot record that is larger than the standard boot sector size.

[jaclaz]

jaclaz:

I'm downloading PartedMagic right now. I've used GPartEd before, but I've never used any of the other utilities. Could you please explain with a bit of detail how you would attempt to repair the MBR or boot sector? I have booted using a windows 7 repair CD and run chkdsk /f. First time it found and fixed errors, second time was clean. Haven't run it with the /r switch yet.

If you have a 7 based PE you can also run CHKDSK /R allright.

Now, all you have to do is to boot PartedMagic (or a similar tool) and see what it sees.

Since it is a Vista, you will need to tell TESTDISK to "ignore cylinder boundaries" or the like.

This is IMPORTANT.

DO NOT use any of the "WRITE" or "fix features f TESTDISK for the moment, just have a look at what it sees.

READ the basic tutorial here:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

You want to start TESTDISK with a LOG file.(you will need some writable media, an USB stick would do).

You want to first see the partitions as TESTDISK finds them, then get to DUMP BOTH the MBR and the NTFS bootsector.

Then, still assuming you are running from PartedMagic, you need to create a backup of both the MBR (or even better first track or 63 sectors and of the bootsector - 1 sector will do)

This can be done with dd (if you need help in using it (yes it is command line) just say so.

An alternative (still if you have the 7 PE on a CD) is getting the windows version of TESTDISK, and a disk editor like tinyhexer and have them on the USB stick

Check this thread also:

(don't worry, you are in a much easier to solve situation than that one, if you can run CHKDSK allright)

Once you have the backup of current MBR and bootsector, from within the 7 PE you should be able to run bootsect.exe (the Windows 7 version can also rewrite the MBR code):

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744577(WS.10).aspx

Say that your drive is seen as C:

bootsect.exe /nt60 C: /mbr 

will rewrite the MBR code, and:

bootsect.exe /nt60 C: 

will rewrite the bootsector

jaclaz

[DylanC]

I just got off the phone with a Dell tech and they are sending a recovery disk. Its frustrating that the system didn't come with a disk or even a CoA sticker, but whatever. To Dell's credit, this is the third day in a row that the tech as attempted to get ahold of me. Today is the first day I was available to talk to him. So, if nothing else, a disk recovery is possible.

Until then I'm still trying to get somewhere the hard way. Neither PartedMagic nor GPartEd would boot on this machine. Both start to boot, and then the PC will restart. At some point I saw an error from GPartED regarding SQUASHFS(?)...not sure if that is relevent. So, no TestDisk. Last night I downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD and I'm trying it right now. Going off of a previous comment (thanks jaclaz) I started PLoP from the HDD->Boot Managers menu on the UBCD and Booting the partitions directly. Partition 1 was some type of hardware diagnostic environment and partition 2 said BOOTMGR missing or something similar. Partition 3 brought up WIndows and I am now staring at a desktop again....yeah!

My goal now is to make sure that all personal documents are backed up and do a reinstall of windows....I'll keep you up to date.

[DylanC]

Final Chapter....I hope.

Even once I got into windows (safe mode because normal would not boot) I could not launch the recovery console. It just wouldn't start, probably because of limitations while in safe mode. Anyway, I was able to get into the F8 Windows Boot menu after selecting "HDA Partition 3" from PLop. Selecting "Repair this Computer" booted the recovery environment on partition 2. A few more clicks and I had the option to "Restore the Dell Factory Image" Right now it's churning away with that task. WIth luck it will rewrite the MBR and things will be back to factory condition.

Again, thanks for everyone's help. It was greatly appreciated.