Can you give me the complete Dell Inspiron model number? It should be on the label on the bottom of the laptop. There does not appear to be a Inspiron 1541.
Also, see this: Dell Inspiron 15 7567 won't boot from USB on the Dell community forum. It;s for a Dell Inspiron 15 but should also apply to your Laptop. Note the 1st response from LSUFAN51, it shows you the UEFI BOOT MENU and how you select the USB flash drive to boot from.
Do you have Secure Boot enabled or Disabled in UEFI Setup? You can check this by hitting F2 during boot instead of F12. If you make a change make sure you save it on exit.
It booted off the thumb drive. Files copied. Mission accomplished.
Let me thank you again for your patience. I don't know why it didn't work before. Perhaps it was the disabling of secure boot that was needed. (I looked up how to do it.)
I tried Macrium. It said it did a couple of things, then gave me a window Restart Yes or No. I told it Yes. Nothing has happened. Three times.
Did it manually, took out the thumb drive. Blue screen.
(Stop code is 0xc000021a)
Will you continue with me on fixing the computer?
At this point, reloading Windows is an option. I know somewhere in the process (noted earlier) I tried that (got to it somewhere in the troubleshooting options) and it ran for awhile and then announced failure.
The original problems were programs opening at random; more than that, any visual thing, typing, mouse cursor, videos, had a glitch. Music vid, for instance, would play as 1..2..3..stop..1..2…
The music kept going properly, but the vid would hang up like that.
I'm trying to just boot it by itself. I cannot figure out what choice to make, and I'm having difficulty turning Secure Boot back on.
Now that your data is backed up, you have two options.
1. Parallel install of Windows 10. This install Windows 10 to your hard drive and moves all your existing install into a Windows.old folder where you can access everything to copy it back to the new install. This is usually sufficient but may or may not fix the boot problem.
2. Clean install of Windows 10. This wipes the install drive completely. You delete all partition on the install drive then let the Windows 10 installer create the ones it needs. This is the best method and the one I recommend but also the one that takes the most work to recover as you need to reinstall everything.
I would like to try the parallel installation, in hopes it will set things right and save me a day installing programs, and I am not sure how long downloading files. (Used to take a week; we have much better internet now.)
However…….
I went to that page, chose option 3, went through the steps, created the thumb drive, and several steps later got told I could not do a custom install of windows if I booted from a USB drive, and to boot normally and go from there……
As usual I do not know if I did things wrong, or what.
I think tomorrow, for yucks, I will try Step 4, booting from an ISO, and see where that gets me.
I did choose Custom, which claims it is NOT the one that sets stuff aside in windows.old. But it does. It did.
I'm shuffling about, trying to get things set up again. Have to see if my mail program (Thunderbird) is sitting there with all its subfolders and saved mail, ready to be moved back over, for instance. Etc.
The stalling in videos etc. has vanished. We'll see if programs egregiously open themselves.
I think this renders this matter Solved.
One more question for the moment. Once upon a time I tortuously worked out how to reload alla that mail from my backup. Unfortunately, it's not listed in My Content. Is there a way to search farther back?
Thanks again!
I will be back almost momentarily for some diagnostics on my wife's computer, which has been making me nuts while she kindly shared it for the past week,
Here are some Google links on how to copy Thunderbird to a new computer. I'm sure it's much like Seamonkey, the follow0on to Mozilla that I use which is a Browser/E-mail suite.
Good morning.
It's such a relief to have the computer up and running again, I forget I'm still working on things….
I will look at the link above. But I really did work out the process for myself in a thread several years ago. It was opaque, but I essentially worked out which files in which locations in my backup (iDrive has saved my ass a few times!) represented my saved emails and put them in place and went back to business.
If my "Content" from farther back can be accessed, there's the step-by-step. If not, I can work it out again. Oh—-bet I should try "Search."
Meanwhile, an oddity. I successfully moved a couple of programs from Windows.old over to the new Program Files. But a day or two ago almost all of the program files in Windows.old apparently vanished. I did a search (s'pose I should repeat with the whole computer) and looked in the recycle bin, but have not found any of them.
It's no disaster—I was expecting to re-install all that stuff from scratch anyway; so I'm somewhat ahead as it is.
Windows 10 typically deletes Windows.old 10 days after install. Not sure why a partial delete though.
Problems like this are why image backup is so important. Buy a 1TB external USB hard drive (around $60) and use Macrium Reflect Free to do an image backup of your hard drive. Setup a regular backup schedule so it's always reasonable current. Then any time theer is a serious problem, recovery is 20-30 minutes away.
I have the Premium version of Macrium and my backups run every Saturday evening; 8PM for C: and 9PM for D: I keep one full backup and four incremental backups with the oldest incremental automatically merged into the full. Saved me more times than I can count.
I can also mount the back image (any one of them) and copy any file or folder I want from the backup image.
