Hello,
I have an Inspiron 15R-5537 laptop that I am needing to reinstall the OS due to constant crashing by the OS. I made a set of recovery DVD's per the Dell Backup and Recovery Software.
When I booted from the recovery discs, I was prompted with "Smart Repair" will attempt to repair the system, only to find no problem. (As to be expected). I clicked next to reinstall the OS. It then gave me a 'Factory Image Cd/DVD Drive' as the image source which I selected and clicked next. During the next step I was given the option between Factory Refresh and Factory Recovery. Initially I chose Factory Refresh.
The following screen showed a green check beside "Initializing", followed by another check by "Backing up Dell Backup and Recovery Settings...". Then after waiting several hours, the status bar was stuck at 59% on the "Preparing your hard drive...". This included letting it go over night for 12+ hours with no change.
I re-ran the process several times and instead of doing the Factory Refresh, I choose the option to erase and recreate all partitions. Again the same result was that the recovery software was hanging at 59% of preparing the hard drive. Finally I decided to use a Win8.1 ISO / Disc I have to reinstall Windows that way since I'm an A+ Tech with 18 years experience.
However when the disc booted and asked me to select my hard drive, no hard drive was found. So I downloaded the SATA drivers from the Dell support site, extracted them to a USB drive and browsed for those drivers. Except those drivers did not work nor load any controller/drive for this laptop. Finally I decided to re-run the Dell Recovery Disc one more time and this time after choosing the same options as above, I immediately am prompted with an error message of:
"Error 0x400110020000100A
If this issue persists, please contact Dell Support."
Being a technician of 18 years, it should NOT be this difficult to re-install an OS. If anyone has any insights or catching something that I'm maybe missing here, please let me know. Thanks!!