Recovery disk not doing its job! Please help.

Hi,

I'm trying to fix my friend's Dell Inspiron 1501. I have its original recovery disk at hand.

The machine froze and my friend was forced to shut it down. Ever since then, it has been unable to boot - it says "Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause" ... bla bla... "The Windows Boot Configuration Data file does not contain a valid OS entry."

What I first tried was booting from the recovery disk and selecting Automatic recovery. This did not seem to change anything as the recovery program was unable to locate an OS to recover!

The next step, I guess, is to reinstall Windows (I need to avoid formatting as he has valuable data in his Windows desktop folder). However, and now comes the really strange part, I am UNABLE to get the recovery CD to display the recovery options again. When I boot from the recovery CD, it starts loading correctly from the CD: "Windows is loading files" for a while, but then instead of finally presenting a list of recovery options, it just decides to try to load the OS on the harddrive and start Windows! This, of course, fails with a BSOD pointing out "Ntfs.sys" as the problem.

Question: How do I get the recovery CD to do its job and reinstall Windows instead of trying to load the broken one?

Any help much appreciated!

 

Ok, so I formatted the main partition using a Windows XP installation CD. As a result, the Dell recovery CD is now willing to install Windows Vista. Talk about a user-unfriendly recovery disk!