I bought inspiron 3421 notebook in May, which came pre-installed with windows 8. In June, I installed windows 8.1 on another partition. Today my windows 8 could not load. So, I chose Dell recovery and back up and successfully restored to a image which was created on 19th March. But, after restoration I couldn’t see OS list. My PC automatically loaded windows 8.1. I checked under ‘control Panel>System>Advance System setting>Advanced>setting under system and recovery’ but found only one OS – “Windows 8”. I also checked under Boot in msconfig.exe but there too only one OS was listed. However when I checked the windows 8 partition via windows 8.1, it has all the necessary files. Moreover, all the softwares which I had installed, documents, music files and photos were missing. That means Dell recovery and back up did its work. I also found in ‘user>administrator>desktop’ folder eBay‘s link (which can pre-saved when I bought notebook and I had deleted it immediately).
The windows 8 partition had a folder titled “Dell”. In Dell>Update Package>log there is a text file named ‘bcmwl.log’.
Installation log file for "DW WLAN Card".
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Log Starts on Date: 3-19-2013 Time: 11:39:08 (The same day when image was created)
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11:39:08: GetOSInfo(): Detected Windows 8
11:39:08: GetOSInfo(): Product Type: Home Premium
And, a file with same name (bcmwl.log ) under similar address (Dell>Update Package>log) has been created in windows 8.1 partition today.
Installation log file for "DW WLAN Card".
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Log Starts on Date: 8-1-2013 Time: 15:35:01
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15:35:01: GetOSInfo(): Detected Windows 8
15:35:01: GetOSInfo(): Product Type: Business
This is definitely related to Windows 8 restoration and its disappearance.
I had created a recovery media on a flash drive (because Dell recovery and back up could not write discs properly…this had been already reported on forum). Few days back I moved flash drive’s content to my hard disk, because I needed it. I think that content wouldn’t help any more (Bootable?).
Since windows 8 PCs don’t come with Product key, I’m in serious problem. I had thought to upgrade my windows 8 to windows 8.1 upon the release of original version. But, now I am stuck with windows 8.1 preview which will expire on 15th Jan’14. Any hope?