Major Latitute 6420 on my daughter's laptop, can someone help?

OK, we bought the 6420 through Dell refurbished last October, love it!

4 days ago we were running some dell cleaning programs to clean it up a bit and after a reboot, it would not boot into the OS, we just got a screen like this


Initializing and establishing link.........and not matter what I do it goes right back to this.

I tried holding F8 and messing with boot order but nothing, right back to this black screen.


I have an IT buddy and what he did was install a Windows 7 "ISO" he had, it works fine now but do not want to use this and want to got back to factory defaults, how can I do this without any disks from Dell? Can I do it in bios or anything?


Thanks so much for reading and I appreciate any help on the matter.

 

Put the service tag into the Dell support site and see what downloads it offers for the computer. They may include an operating system ISO image. Or you can get one from Microsoft. While at the Dell site also check for the most recent versions of drivers for your E6420.

John

 

Thanks John


Would the Iso Windows Ultimate that was installed mess up the original bios or settings in anyway? I think Dell might sell recovery disks but I was trying to get away from that and just use what I have, or downloads from the site like you suggest.

 

It should not have messed up the BIOS or any settings stored at that level (including Dell's Windows 10 key). You can run a keyfinder software to find out the key. Does Windows report itself as Professional (or whatever version was supplied) or some other version?

John

 

The original version was Win 7 32 bit Pro


What is on there now is Win 7 Ultimate but it has no key because it is just an ISO disk, which is why I do not want it.

 

So the Ultimate is unactivated? Try using the keyfinder to get the Windows key from the BIOS, put that into the Ultimate and see what happens. It might figure out that it is a key for the Pro version and configure itself accordingly. The basic Windows installation is the same - the key defines which version.

I should note, however, that I've not tried running Windows 7 Pro using a Win 10 Pro key which gives the downgrade rights so my suggestions might not work.

John

 

Ok thanks again. I will try some stuff after work and see if I can make any headway