L502x start up issue

Hey guys,

I have a Dell XPS L502x w/ Windows 7, about 2 years old, and a few days ago when I went to turn it on it went straight to the automatic repair screen because it could not load windows.
I let it do its thing for over a day, but still there was no change in the status of repair. I went into advanced options, tried a system restore (which, it could not find any restore points, which makes me think my HD might be toast), and then finally a system restore to factory settings. The computer restarted and it went to the same failed to load windows automatic repair page.
In my mind, the HD is toast-- Considering it couldn't locate any of my restore points, and after restoring it to its factory point had no effect.
What does your intuition tell you?
I would try a fresh install of windows, but I seem to have lost the CD. Should I bite the bullet and pay someone $60 for a fresh install?

I appreciate it,

Tim

 

don't pay someone for a fresh install. you can do it yourself. there's a place you can download, legitimately, full Windows 7 installation DVDs that work with the key found on the base of your laptop. if you can get to someone else's computer to download and burn the DVD image, you should be able to do the fresh install yourself.

Here's the post with all the links to the Windows 7 DVD images:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...-digitalriver-windows-7-sp1-13-languages.html

Download the image for the version of Windows specified in your product key

and burn to DVD. Then you should able to just boot off of it and install Windows.

Now, as for why it couldn't find any restore points, it's possible that it was looking in the wrong place. Sometimes when the index specifying what logical disk is where gets corrupted, your system doesn't know what drive to look in and will just look for the first available one. For example, if you dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7, you might have C:\ and D:\ partitions (let's say XP = C, Win7 = D). If Windows 7 is your primary OS and the boot record gets borked, your Windows Recovery/Repair wizard might be looking in the wrong partition.

If the hard drive really is dying, I'm not so confident that you would be able to run Windows Repair like that. I think you would have more trouble than not finding your Restore points.

 

Thanks for the input, I'll give it a shot!

 

If you can: put your HDD in an external enclosure, backup your data, and then use a disk utility to check for errors.

If the disk check goes ok (even if it finds and marks some bad sectors) - reinstall OS and see how it goes.