Today my laptop wouldn't boot. It comes up with the Dell logo, with XPS underneath, and the progress bar under that. Once the progress bar is finished it says:
Realtek PCIe GBE family controller series V2.35 (06/14/10)
CLIENT MAC ADDR: F0 4D A2 64 34 4A
GUID: 44454C4C-4 E00-1047-8048 C8C04F365031
PXE-MOF: Exiting PXE ROM.
Operating system not found.
I've gone through the diagnostics, and the hard drive check said "not applicable". I checked the BIOs, and the primary hard drive is not there, but the second one is showing. I've reseated the primary hard drive to no avail. I'm assuming I'm going to have to replace the primary hard drive, but wondering if there might be some other solution. I have the original installation disks and tried doing a system restore but of course it doesn't find the operating system so can't do a system restore. I also tried system repair, which didn't help. I haven't tried system image recovery, mainly because it would replace what's on the drive with data from 2014, but I'm not sure that this would work anyway - would it? Using the installation disk I can go to the command prompt and get to the C drive which shows:
I was surprised that the image backup is on the C drive, because I thought it was on the D drive.
I do have lots of backup - I backup nightly to an external hard drive, and last night's backup was successful. I also backup "to the cloud", so no shortage of backup. I would just like to know, before I replace the hard drive, if there is something else I can do.
If anyone has advice for me, I'd appreciate it! :)