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Thursday, January 5, 2017

Dell 7537 Windows 10 Upgrade issue reboot loop and how to rebuild without Recovery disk create Dell recovery disk yourselves

Reboot loop after upgrading to Windows 10 & Rebuild Dell machine from scratch without recovery disk.

Even though Im writing this blog little bit late but I think it might be useful to others. With Windows 10 release I started upgrading my Dell 7537 laptop to Windows 10 on first day itself, I did created Dell recovery disk as I was was confident that upgrade will go smooth, but it didnt happen :(.

After upgrading to Windows 10 my laptop was on continuous reboot loop and I tried various options from Boot such as changing to GPT, UEFI and it didnt help at all. Now Im stuck as there was no option to go back to Windows 8.1 and I dont have recovery disc, I tried searching media all over WEB but I couldnt find source anywhere. Then I contacted Dell UK Support and they informed me that Dell Recovery Disks costs around £29/- which I was not ready to pay. Moreover they can only provide disks but the model doesnt have CD/DVD Drive, hence recovery disks from DELL is not solution at all, when I asked support engineer how to recover with disks he dont have answer, what he mentioned was I need to use another computer to convert disks into bootable USB Disk. After getting escalated to his line manager he offered to provide disks for free but he mentioned it takes 5 business days to receive (I actually received after 10 days). Also I cant install OS without Product Key, at least in my model I dont have Product Key sticker its embedded in hardware.

As my machine was no use and didnt have recovery disks yet from Dell, I have started searching various other options by going through various blogs. I came across this wonderful & very helpful sites for Dell - http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/ by Philip Yip.

What I understand is that we cannot directly build Windows 10 even if you have Product Key, the option is to upgrade Activated version of Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10.

Note by performing below steps you will lose the data as we are formatting so I suggest you to take backup on another disk.

Requirements

A working machine with internet connectivity
USB Disk with at least 8GB

Since my machine is not bootable I followed the below steps

Downloaded Windows 8.1 media creation tool
Downloaded Windows 8.1 x64 ISO
Using Rufus-2.2 created bootable version of 8.1
Make sure Dell Laptop is configured with UEFI Partition & GPT disks (this is default settings for Dell laptop)
Boot from USB Stick it will automatically build the machine with Windows 8.1
After installation, Windows 8 is activated
I didnt install NVIDIA GEFORCE drivers as many said the reboot loop might be because of nvidia display
Download Windows 10 using media creation tool
copied the ISO to bootable USB media using Rufus
From windows 8 itself launched setup.exe and it upgraded windows 10 without any issue.

Creating Windows 10 Recovery Disk from Philip Yip -

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUNvnIFT3g&feature=youtu.be

Step by step - http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/a-clean-install-of-windows-10/creating-a-recovery-drive-and-using-it-in-windows-10/#Creating

Download link for Windows 10 media creation tool

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-in/windows-10/media-creation-tool-install

Download link for Windows 8.1 media creation tool

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-IN/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media

Creating bootable USB disk for DELL with UEFI Partition

http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/a-clean-install-of-windows/converting-your-dell-windows-reinstallation-dvd-into-a-reinstallation-usb/#BootableUSB

You can check your OS Product key embedded in hardware using RWEverything and following steps mentioned here

http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/a-clean-install-of-windows/a-clean-install-of-windows-8-1/installation-of-windows-8-1-with-a-windows-8-0-retail-product-key-notes/#OEMKey

Philip Yip website was very useful & helpful as I could recover my machine without recovery disk from Dell.

Available link for download