Shopsmith Forums

My computer crashed. Backups seem to be corrupted, and computer does not boot. Dell recovery software reports no problems. Confusing.. Will not post from this phone. Too time consuming.

Too bad. How old is the computer? If it has some years under its belt, it might be time for a new one.

I feel for ya bud. I lost some stuff recently from a crash. Machine was fixed but some data is gone forever. My own fault though, procrastination, I was going to get those files backed up the very next day.

garys wrote: Sun Feb 20, 2022 7:59 pm Too bad. How old is the computer? If it has some years under its belt, it might be time for a new one.

Itn is a Dell XPS Tower and is about four years old, Most all of the diagnostics report no problem. I am missing something.

Most diagnostics try to test the hardware. The hardware is usually far more reliable than the software. More than likely it is a problem with Windows losing a critical file to start up. If you can get your hands on a working computer to work with, download an image of Linux. Put it on a thumb drive and attempt to boot the computer from that. If it boots up and runs, you have just tested all the computer hardware except the hard drive so your problem is either the hard drive or Windows. If it doesn't boot, then the rest of the computer hardware has a problem.

garys wrote: Mon Feb 21, 2022 7:26 am Most diagnostics try to test the hardware. The hardware is usually far more reliable than the software. More than likely it is a problem with Windows losing a critical file to start up. If you can get your hands on a working computer to work with, download an image of Linux. Put it on a thumb drive and attempt to boot the computer from that. If it boots up and runs, you have just tested all the computer hardware except the hard drive so your problem is either the hard drive or Windows. If it doesn't boot, then the rest of the computer hardware has a problem.

Got It. Can Do if my Microsoft Surface can do this.

I have never seen a Microsoft Surface so I can't suggest anything there. Once you have the image downloaded, you need software capable of writing a USB bootable image. If you have that, it should work.

dusty wrote: Mon Feb 21, 2022 7:33 am
Got It. Can Do if my Microsoft Surface can do this.

It depends on which version of the Surface you have. If it’s the version that allows you to install normal Windows programs then it is a full PC and will do what Garys suggests. If it’s one of the trimmed down versions, and you can only install programs you get from Microsoft Store, then it’s not a full PC and it won’t work for this.

If the computer is only four years old then it should be able to be fixed, and like Garys said, these days hardware is usually not the problem. Dells does have a a diagnostic utility built into their BIOS that can do a full test on all the hardware. If that doesn’t find a problem then the hardware is probably good. I say probably because nothing is 100%.

Also, Windows 10 does have a boot mode that can do OS repairs at the lower level, so boot sector problems can be fixed, and it can do an OS restore. So all is not necessarily lost.


Good luck getting it figured out.

Not all BIOS are equal, but when I made a Win10 bootable USB stick I also needed to change BIOS settings so that the system looked at USB first rather than HDD first. My experience was that it used the first image it found, not necessarily the first good image.

- David

Hope that you can resolve the issue , I am no computer expert and this may not have anything to do with your issue , we had a notice a while back about the computer was not going to be compatible with the new @net platform of windows , said much of our programming will not be useable .we had to get new phones as well .