XPS 1530 fails to start up windows

Hello all. Afraid this is going to be a bit of long post, but so I get all the details in. If anyone has any ideas – fantastic, because Dell Support are driving me crazy!

Computer: Dell XPS 1530, about 7 months old. No previous issues. I believe my brother may have pressed the Dell Media Direct button by accident at startup. When loading up DMD it gave the error “cannot access HDD. This may be because you have enabled Microsoft Bitlocker.” I haven’t, and didn’t even think it was available on Vista Home Premium?

Anyway, if I start up and do nothing, it gets past the initial bios load-up, then just black screen with flashing cursor top left. Note that I cannot get into F8 starting like this. If I press DMD to start up, it starts up, gets to a blue screen (not the crash blue screen, but like windows), but nothing shows. If I switch off, it shows me “Exiting Windows” as if I was properly in DMD. If I then try and switch on again normally, I CAN get into F8, but the only options I have are “continue with start-up”, or sthg like “delete system restoration and continue to boot-menu” (which doesn’t do anything). There’s no safe mode option or anything.

Got some data on the HDD that I hadn’t yet backed up, so would very much like to salvage it. Any ideas would be much appreciated!

 

Have you tried booting from the Windows Recovery disc provided by Dell? If you haven't yet, maybe you can give that a try and run Startup Repair or System Restore (which both don't delete your HD data). If Startup Repair doesn't work the first time, you may want to run it a couple of times as sometimes it fixes the problem after several tries. It seems that your problem is with DMD trying to find your HD data. Haven't encountered that before w/ my XPS M1530, but just give the Recovery Disc a try in case you haven't.