First thought - the boot block on the drive has been corrupted! I suspect the system has a Linux type OS in the recovery partition that may be accessible using a Linux bootmanager on a USB drive.
Alternative may be to use any windows installing CD/DVD or other booting facility and 'fix the MBR' to go to whatever boot program is on the windows partition that will load the windows OS selection manager from the windows partition. Normal BIOS startup will be to look for the MBR and then the Boot files on the First ACTIVE Primary partition it finds while checking the devices connected to the boot permitted interfaces. (see BIOS) As in - Partition table is probably OK with the windows partition Primary, Active and formatted as NTFS (well I presume you can see he data from a booting CD\DVD\USB booting memory stick/card/drive.) You should have the Boot and windows OS selection files (names vary depending on the Windows OS installed) on the root of the windows partition (probably c:\) And probably have the Windows startup files in that partition - maybe the root partition, but that depends on where they will have been set -especially if there have been multiple OS instances installed on that partition So - if the windows partition is OK - just set the MBR and Bootblock go to that partition. Alternatively, you should be able to use a Booting restore program CD from any similar system - so if you have one, check how to create that CD and see if you can get it to just fix the boot as if there was a new replacement hard drive in the case. JimB From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of J- P Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2014 9:28 PM To: NT Subject: [NTSysADM] Factory recovery / restore from WIM Hi all, I have an inspiron 530s desktop that will only boot to USB or CD, using hirens I can see that the DELL recovery partition is still intact as well as the .WIM file f8 only gives the boot namager error, what tool /utlity can i use to restore this to factory? thanks
