Hello,
I have a Dell Inspiron 660 with Windows 8 installed. Shortly after purchasing the computer, power was pulled on the computer and it was not able to shutdown cleanly. Upon starting back up, a screen was showb that said "Recovery" at the top and said "Your PC couldn't start properly" and gave options to "Enter to try again, F8 for startup settings, or Esc for UEFI Firmware settings". Neither option would allow me to either get back into Windows 8 or reset or recover the OS. I had to get Dell tech support involved. They ended up sending me the Windows 8 reinstallation disc.
Once the disc was received, Dell walked me through the process of reinstalling Windows 8. The system was then brought up to date, both Windows 8 and drivers, and the computer worked for another few days. This time, after a proper restart/shutdown, the computer came back to the same Recover screen and the only option was to reinstall Windows 8 again.
When installing Windows 8 for the 2nd time, instead of Windows overwriting the existing OS partition, the existing partition was manually deleted before the OS was installed. This was done to prevent Windows from renaming the Windows folder to another name. I wanted to eliminate all existence of Windows. The other partitions that are installed from Dell were left as is. Again, the OS was fully updated as well as the drivers.
Again, the computer ran fine for a couple of days and upon restarting the computer, the OS would not boot properly (now for a 3rd time). Somehow, the OS is getting corrupt.
There are no attached devices to the computer except for the keyboard, mouse, and monitor. OS is up to date and so are the drivers. Dell's hardware test has passed several times.
Does anyone know what is going on? This computer has only seen several months of light usage with typical additional applications installed like Firefox, Google Chrome, and LogMeIn.
Thank you,