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My friend's HDD was failing (according to SMART) in their DELL (out of warranty by about 4 months, but still less than 2 years old). I offered to replace with with a SSD since they wanted the speed boost it would bring. I'm using the built in DELL recovery image. I installed it no problem and used the DELL recovery image and recovery software (DELL DataSafe Local Backup). It imaged it correctly as it boots into Windows without a problem. However, after a reboot it says "The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible". AHCI looks like it was automatically applied in the BIOS, so that's not it. Am I doing something wrong or it because the backup image was from from a HDD based image?

Is it better to install windows from a stock Microsoft image?

Thanks in advance guys!

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  • So after restore it will boot into Windows once, and that's it? May 17, 2012 at 0:26
  • Was the Dell image for all the factory partitions or did it just restore the C partition?
    – Moab
    May 17, 2012 at 1:08
  • Yeah, it will only boot once. The Dell image was weird, it actually partitioned my SSD into two, one for the OS (C:), one for a backup of the factory image (it took up 20GB of valuable SSD space!).
    – StoneFX
    May 17, 2012 at 21:36

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I ended up downloading EasyBCD and seeing that my boot device was listed as unknown. I added C:\ to the entry and now it works fine. I'm not sure why the DELL image had issues creating a valid boot entry. Either way, after restoring the DELL image, turns out there is so much bloatware garbage that I'm just going to use a clean image of Windows 7. I'll create my buddy a backup image after installing all the required drivers, etc.

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