# [SOLVED] Dell Laptop Recovery Issues



## nfinite (Aug 21, 2008)

I recently tried to restore my Dell Inspiron E1405 laptop to factory conditions using Dell's included PC Restore utility. 

I followed the instructions exactly: Ctrl + F11 at the dell.com screen and confirmed the PC restore option. Thinking the automated process should do its thing, I left the room for a while. Coming back I was greeted with a screen saying "A disk read error occured ... Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

I forgot to mention that I either did not receive any recovery disks from Dell or they are long lost somewhere... =x
I do, however, have a Windows XP OEM and proceeded to install that. (Just to get the laptop to some usable state).

After this error I did my research and found a guide from goodells.net to try to manually re-image the laptop. I was able to follow the guide up to where Ghost takes over and actually re-images the drive. At around 50-55% way through the process, an error message comes up and says something along the lines of Internal Error 36000 and then something about an inconsistency.

This lead me to get back to manually using the Ghost [Recover.exe] application on the DellRestore partition and run integrity checks on both hard disk and backup images. I also ran CHKDSK on the drive as well. These checks did not produce any errors. Running the re-imaging again resulted in the same inconsistency error.

In searching for a solution to Error 36000 I found another person with the same issue as I have (compared Ghosterr.txt logs) and their solution was to delete all partitions and format the drive - seems there's an error with trying to detect a present NTFS filesystem. I want to try this as a last resort method though. Another option I found was to update my version of Ghost ... though I wouldn't know how to do that as it's Dell's provided tool...

So before I go to my last resort, I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on things I could try before backing up the images elsewhere and completely wiping the drive.

Thank you very much for any help!


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## TriggerFinger (Jan 30, 2008)

*Re: Dell Laptop Recovery Issues*

Run HDD diagnostics like Hitachi Drive Fitness Test. See link on my sig HDD Diagnostic Tools to download the utility. I suggest you get the CD image files (ISO extension) as these are usually make bootable CDs. Booting from the CDs removes the need of a running Windows system. As long as your laptop can boot from the CD/DVD drive then the diags would run.

To burn the ISO image into a blank CD, you should have Nero or ImgBurn. Copying it directly to the CD would not make that CD bootable. If you are using ImgBurn, right click on the ISO file and select 'Burn with ImgBurn'.

After running the HDD diagnostic, run Memtest86+ to test your RAM. Memtest86+ also has a CD image version (ISO extension). Burn it to a blank CD just like the HDD tool previously discussed. Likewise, you can boot from the CD and Memtest would run automatically.


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## nfinite (Aug 21, 2008)

*Re: Dell Laptop Recovery Issues*

Sorry for the trouble, I managed to solve the problem (or at least get it to work). I'm not sure if the drive diagnostics tools would have reported differently, but I had already run CHKDSK and the drive integrity check in Ghost with no problems.

I called up a friend who had a newer version of the DOS based Ghost. The one provided by Dell was Ghost 8.3 and my friend had Ghost 11. It seems the Error was the fault of Ghost itself and not the drive. The laptop is now back to its original condition!

Again, thanks for your time!


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