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    i deleted ALL my laptop partitions by mistake during installing windows 7

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by shadii, Aug 4, 2014.

  1. shadii

    shadii Newbie

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    Hello,
    i have an old dell laptop,Inspiron 6400,
    when i tried to install windows 7 on it, ( it had XP) , I DELETED ALL PARTITIONS BY MISTAKE, ALL OF THEM ! (i remember there was some primary and logical partitions as well as MediaDirect partition), so after that , my pc gets error about the hard drive "that it isn't safe and i should back up my data" , i also checked it with a program and the result says the hard is not healthy.
    i installed windows 7 so many times, (i just format that unallocated partiton and installed windows on it, i mean it has just one partition)
    Also my dvd driver doesn't work well, it's slow and doesn't read all of dvd.s,
    I thought i should restore my laptop factory settings, so i tried to install those cd.s which came with laptop including Dell MediaDirect, but during installation it stops and says my hard isn't ready, i tried to insert some other factory dvd.s but it doesn't even read them!
    I thought maybe i should install xp again, so that i can install these, but after installing xp, nothing has changed ! i still receive those errors,
    I'm so worried, i ll appreciate any help,
    Thanks for reading
     
    shadii, Aug 4, 2014
    #1
  2. mariussx

    mariussx Notebook Evangelist

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    If you confirmed already that the HDD fails the test, you should get a new HDD (they are like £50 for 1TB or £50 for 120GB SSD). Then you can install your Windows 7 or XP to the new HDD. Since your original is failing even if you successfully install the operating system, your laptop will be slow and eventually not boot into windows. You will have to swap the old HDD and reinstall everything anyway, so beter sooner than later. You could also test your HDD using Dell built in hardware diag tools: turn off your system, power it on and keep pressing F12, then choose diagnostics. Given the age of the laptop you might want to consider getting a new laptop as it would be improvement in all the hardware specs.
     
    mariussx, Aug 4, 2014
    #2
  3. Commander Wolf

    Commander Wolf can i haz broadwell?

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    Yeah... your problem probably doesn't have anything to do with deleting the partitions, but with the drive itself failing.
     
    Commander Wolf, Aug 9, 2014
    #3