Slamman Posted January 31, 2012 Share Posted January 31, 2012 (edited) I'm basically spelling out what the last poster has said, that if one of your optical drives doesn't work, replace it with your HDD, you can try and see what happens, jumpers and the placement on the IDE cable (flex, flat, ribbon cable) will determine how the computer sees them and gives which one priority. Highly unlikely to have a restore partition on a 2004 era Dell. You painted yourself into a bit of a corner, you can put an add out looking for free Dell parts of that vintage, it's an idea other people have used. The Recuver tool or similar name, is found on CCleaner's website, the same company hosts it, it can help recover files that aren't completely over written, I downloaded the same application to try and recover data myself, but I haven't put the time into using it yet. Here's where to get these FREE tools; http://www.piriform.com/download Edited January 31, 2012 by Slamman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf68k Posted January 31, 2012 Share Posted January 31, 2012 In Wolf's example, if you're testing the XP disc on a setup system, it's still a bit risky, unless you've worked with installs enough to know where and when, but it loads files from the XP disc to your online dynamic RAM, so it's storing the i365 file for the most part, I believe, and then it will reboot at a point where you don't need to press a Space key to boot from a detected drive. WTF are you talking about? How is it risky? It's a legal copy of the OS. You put the disc in, the first sign you know it's working correctly is that the system say "Press any key to boot from CD" followed by a series of dots which I believe are timed to appear 1 per second. If you don't press a key the system will boot to the HDD. So after you press a key you'll see a screen that's blue and says Windows Setup. At any point you see that you know the disc should be good and that there is something wrong with the other system that you're not even getting that far. It'll take about 2-3minutes before the screen asking if you want to install, repair, or quit even comes up and even when it does it'll sit there until you do something. Even if the disc is a factory restore disc it's not going to do so far that you can't simple stop the process before it does something. Worse case scenario it's a custom made unattended CD, but here again you'll still see the "Press any key to boot from CD" and see the blue screen saying Windows Setup long before it'll start actually trying to write files to the drive, it has to write some files to the RAMdisk it creates first. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ccrogers15 Posted February 1, 2012 Share Posted February 1, 2012 Had a similar issue once. Do this: 1. Download Ubuntu (or any linux) 2. Burn it to CD and install. Now windows 7 is gone. 3. If you have another windows disk, install it. If you need windows, Windows 8 beta is free for 90 days. (and all you gotta do after 90 days, is you can uninstall and reinstall to trick it and get 90 days again.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slamman Posted February 1, 2012 Share Posted February 1, 2012 I got to be friends with a guy refurbing Dells on Techspot's forums, he decided to close shop when Netbooks took over the low end market, he shipped me his old XP Home and Pro discs and laptop extras, it was like Christmas early. I even bought a used ODD with XP Pro inside! Sadly, another copy scratched all to hell. I did pay $150 once for XP, luckily you don't need to do that now, I see copies selling for under $50, so keep your eyes peeled, you can get XP for about $10 or $15 cheaper Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ccrogers15 Posted February 1, 2012 Share Posted February 1, 2012 I got to be friends with a guy refurbing Dells on Techspot's forums, he decided to close shop when Netbooks took over the low end market, he shipped me his old XP Home and Pro discs and laptop extras, it was like Christmas early. I even bought a used ODD with XP Pro inside! Sadly, another copy scratched all to hell. I did pay $150 once for XP, luckily you don't need to do that now, I see copies selling for under $50, so keep your eyes peeled, you can get XP for about $10 or $15 cheaper Actually if you own XP, have the XP folder, and have the product key, if you can proove you own a legal copy they will give you a replacement disk. All you gotta do is pay for shipping. I did this to replace my XP home disk... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slamman Posted February 1, 2012 Share Posted February 1, 2012 OEM made it a NON OPTION, I did call MS about replacing a damaged disc, I told them the number of the disc, as proof of course Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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