My son-in-law gave me my grandson's used Dell laptop, Inspiron 3520. I fiddled a bit with Windows 8 on it but decided I'd rather have my own Win7 image (saved on my external USB drive) copied to the boot. I didn't know that Win8 wouldn't boot from a CD (imaging restore disk) without some work. After looking that up and learning about tweaks to the UEFI boot involving enabling 'legacy ROM', I was able to boot on my CD and 'restore' my Win7 image to the laptop. Seemed fine, but then it won't boot from the internal HD. After about 2 seconds of booting it reports exiting PXE (BIOS?) and please insert disk. But I've tried 3 boot disks, none of them give an option to exit and boot from the HD. OK, then, break into BIOS via F2 or F12 right on power up. That works, but then I get stuck, in over my head. I'm unable to bypass the legacy (maybe I shouldn't?), unable to set it to boot from the HD.
Win8 'restored' to Win7 via CD boot, now won't boot from HD. BIOS tweak needed
- Thread starter rootazoid
- Start date
Solution
I bet this is the same "anonymous1", no? First off, you have it backwards, I'm not looking to back up ~~from~~ a 3520, I restored an image of my home-made desktop boot partition ~~to~~ this 3520. And where did you get this "dimension xxxx"? I never mentioned a Dimension.
I know you're trying to help, otherwise why bother? But maybe you should read and think before you post again.
- Mar 16, 2013
- 171,804
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OK...don't create dupes. Let's go with this one.
You have a Dell 3520, with Win8.
You had a Win 7 image, saved on an external drive. Where did this come from?
This Win 7 was then 'copied' to the Dell hard drive.
How was the Win 7 image created?
How was it moved to the Dell drive?
You have a Dell 3520, with Win8.
You had a Win 7 image, saved on an external drive. Where did this come from?
This Win 7 was then 'copied' to the Dell hard drive.
How was the Win 7 image created?
How was it moved to the Dell drive?
The image was created by Aomei Backupper, a free, easy and reliable system/partition backup/restore tool. Not trying to sound like an ad. So then I saved it to my external drive as usual for insurance against a corrupted Win7 on my usual desktop computer. Using a boot CD created by Aomei, and of course attaching the external to the 3520, I used Aomei to overwrite the C drive on the Dell 3520.
To do that, though, I had to use the Win8 UEFI tool to enable Legacy ROM to allow booting from a CD. I do believe the whole process worked, but now the 3520 needs more BIOS work to get back to booting from its C partition HD. That's where I'm stuck.
Thanks, I didn't know PXE was about networks and I didn't intentionally set it up to boot from a network. Right, before the screen says Exiting PXE it complains that it cannot find a network. So that makes sense. Read my last reply above for more possible clues for me, the clueless.
OK, a tech came over for a few things including this. Short answer, couldn't make it work. He did fiddle the BIOS to make it boot from its own HD, but then when booting Windows threw up a REPAIRING WINDOWS alert. That stayed on the screen long enough that we tried booting from the Aomei CD again, where we found a DOS CMD utility. He fiddled with that quite a bit, then rebooted. Back to the REPAIRING WINDOWS alert. After 45 minutes of that he said to just do a plain vanilla install of Win7 from my disc. OK, that succeeded, but BOO. 
But... now the laptop doesn't find my wireless router. It had immediately hooked up under Win8, so I know it's not hardware. I, and possibly he, will return to the fix maybe later today.
But... now the laptop doesn't find my wireless router. It had immediately hooked up under Win8, so I know it's not hardware. I, and possibly he, will return to the fix maybe later today.
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