That bloody Dell laptop now £292 (as low as £279!!)-EDITED FIRST POST

mnsfldpaul

Has anyone else had a problem creating a Dell OS recovery cd on this? It get's to about 85% then stops and comes up with an error. If I try another disk it starts at 85% again so does not work. Anyone got any ideas?

Many thanks

Paul

fatheralice

Contact Dell, and ask them to send the installation disks - they should do so for free ( they charge £5 if you order them at the time!!)

Worth having anyway, wether you get the os recovery thing working or not.

talkshop

Just Copy all the files from the Dell folder to a blank DVD.

I think there are ways to make it bootable.

Or contact Dell technical support, and they will send all the disks needed.

You do have to have a good story to get the disks from Dell, but it worked for me.

jonboy31

thor wrote:

Grrrr...I got the laptop a few days ago but have only just had time now to get it out of the box and turn it on. All seemed fine I attempted to use the DVD rewriter. It recognises every type of disc correctly but I can only explore the contents of a few of them. I know that some drives have issues with DVD+/-R discs but it also has problems with CD-R/W and plain old CDs. When i put in the software disc that came with the laptop the disc autoran but failed to find the file on the disc that the computer was looking for.
On reading the owners manual I spotted that there was a utility that could be run to test the hardware if you press F12 before WinXP had loaded but when I ran this test on the disc drive the results were all passes.
So it looks like that I will have to test Dell's customer support unless anyone knows of a fix should the fault not lie with a dodgy drive.

I will be interested to know your outcome of this as I seem to have the same problem. When I put my netgear router installation CD in the drive all it does is recognise the title of the disc, I cant access the content of it.

John

Chuffy

mnsfldpaul wrote:

Has anyone else had a problem creating a Dell OS recovery cd on this? It get's to about 85% then stops and comes up with an error. If I try another disk it starts at 85% again so does not work. Anyone got any ideas?

Many thanks

Paul

I'm having exactly the same problem - it starts burning then kills the CD rendering it unusable. I also would appreciate advice on this.

Wi11iams

Ive also had this problem but mine seems to go higher than 85% all I can say is mine failed 2ce but when I put the discs in the XP install/repair screen comes up from the cd so I guess it has worked, although as I have not gone thorugh with it I cannot be 100% confident, but if you haven't already, put the cd back in and see if it autoplays.

competitionscafe

Still waiting for my laptop, was away last Thursday but I was in all day today and Friday (I work from home)

03/27/2006 1:35 P.M. RECEIVER WAS UNAVAILABLE TO SIGN ON 3RD DELIVERY ATTEMPT
03/27/2006 6:24 A.M. IMPORT SCAN
03/27/2006 6:23 A.M. OUT FOR DELIVERY

EDINBURGH, GB 03/24/2006 2:41 P.M. THE RECEIVER WAS NOT AVAILABLE TO SIGN ON THE 2ND DELIVERY ATTEMPT. A 3RD DELIVERY ATTEMPT WILL BE MADE;PACKAGE WILL BE DELIVERED NEXT BUSINESS DAY-NO SATURDAY GUARANTEE

thor

jonboy31 wrote:

I will be interested to know your outcome of this as I seem to have the same problem. When I put my netgear router installation CD in the drive all it does is recognise the title of the disc, I cant access the content of it.

John

To the earlier post about writing with XP, that is not what I was having a moan about. My problem was that the discs were only appearing as an icon and not letting me having access to the files they contained.
Well I tried it today and every disc worked perfectly! Jonboy, I would be happy to tell you what I did(your drive is exactly the way mine was acting) but I only left it overnight and did nothing more. When a computer behaves like this it gets me a bit worried as it suggests intermittant behaviour which could return at any time.
Since the drive was working I decided to get the laptop connected to my computer and hey presto, now I have an intermittant connection problem.
I have an old netgear DSL MR314 router connected via the LAN to my PC. There is already a computer connected wirelessly and working with no troubles but when I try and link the inspiron I get a very unreliable link even when it is just inches away from the router. The signal strength is nearly always excellent but when I try and do a bit of browsing or updating a program over the internet there is usually no connection. The irritating thing is that it does worl occasionally but then fails before my very eyes. Perhaps the router is at fault but then why does the other pc connect without a hitch? Has anyone else experienced this problem? Looking through Dell's support forum is very discouraging as there are so many faults reported there. I could not find anything describing my situation exactly so I am seriously considering getting DELL to take the laptop back for repair. I hope 90 days reurn to base for repair is exactly as it sounds and that they don't quibble about taking it back.

tightus_wad

DELL recovery - look in one of the directories - in top level begining with C i think! under this dir, about 2 levels down (do a search for .iso -quicker!) there is a .ISO file about 556mb. This is the image of the recovery cd. Lots of freeware on web to allow you to burn this to a CD. PM me if you need more info. I've just done this tonight - it works super fine!

aliasojo

I had similar problems with my drive......burning the Dell back up os failed part way. Then the drive wouldn't open to get the failed disk out and I had to restart the machine. Some disks wouldn't run etc. I thought the drive was dodgy and considered phoning Dell.

I ended up reformatting the machine and putting a fresh copy of Windows on (from an XP disk) and installing all the drivers I downloaded from the Dell site.

Lappy has worked brilliantly since. Not one problem. I think the rubbish Dell put on before shipping is a problem tbh, even if you uninstall most/all of it, odd registry keys will still be left behind. Don't quite understand why software could affect a drive as the drive doesn't have software programs that could conflict with other programs.....it just has drivers, but it does seem weird how all my issues went as soon as the machine was formatted.