I've messed up my E6540 restore partition.

Hi,

My sister has an E6540 which a few months ago I tried to help reload for her using the restore partition. It worked but there was a problem... I realise this is really unhelpful, but I can't quite remember what was wrong - but it was something about the boot process that was causing a convoluted boot-up process. I searched it, and found a command line command that I *think* was supposed to correct the master boot record. The command completed in very quick time.

Sadly it didn't work, and now I can't boot the machine normally, nor get into the recovery partition to re-image the system.

5 months have now passed and she's asked me to fix it. i'm really not sure where to start. I'd really like to be able to use the recovery partiion - as then I've got the factory image and don't need to mess around with drivers and so on. I'm also fairly sure the data is there (since the command I ran completed so quickly). I just don't know how to mount the drive to access it. I have another laptop and an external 2.5" caddy that I can use to access the drive on another machine if needed.

Would anyone be able to point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

 

Pull the drive, use the caddy and another computer to backup the data. Download needed drivers from Dell's site.

Replace the drive, and use a digital river ISO to clean install windows, install drivers, patch windows. Honestly, a clean install isn't that hard and doesn't take that long. If you'd just started by doing that instead of futzing with the restore partition that wasn't working, you'd be done by now.