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Blog: Dell

I recently attempted to upgrade a Dell Latitude laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I started with a clean Win7 installation with most of the updated device drivers from Dell. The upgrade went smoothly … until it rebooted and I got the following error:
 
xC1900101 - 0x20017 Installation failed during safe OS phase with an error during boot operation
 
The good news was the installer backed out the upgrade and I was able to use the laptop with Win7. Researching this error code provided lots of suggestions related to hardware like removing RAM, disabling wireless and Bluetooth and so on. These worked for some people but not all so I kept digging.
 
Then I remembered that one of the things I didn’t upgrade was the BIOS. It was running version A06 and the current version from Dell was A16. Once I figured out I had to do a two-step upgrade (going directly to A16 did not work), I reran the upgrade tool and it worked, no boot error.
 
As a side note I found out that if you upgrade by downloading the installer from the Internet (rather than an ISO) the install files are stored in “c:\windows\$Windows.~BT”. You can run setup from this folder to avoid downloading the files again.

Networking, Windows 10, Dell,
 

Was working on a Dell PC that had a failed Seagate hard drive. The drive would spin up but could not be detected by the system. I was able to order a new drive and get the PC back up and running. However there were tons of photos and documents that need to be recovered if possible. I found that  some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives have known firmware bugs. There are two common errors.

  • 0 LBA error: it happens when your BIOS can recognize your HDD at POST moment, but as an 0MB drive.
  • BSY error: it happens when your HDD enter on a halt state, or BuSY state. In this condition, your HDD will not be recognized by BIOS at POST moment.

The error I encountered was the BSY error, which is recoverable. But it requires connecting to the drives serial interface which is located next to the SATA connector.
I purchased the required RS232-to-TTL Adapter from eBay, followed one of the better sets of directions I found on Google and was able to recover all the data from the drive. [more]

How to recover from BSY error - https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/

RS232-TTL Adapters on eBay - http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2047675.m570.l1313&_nkw=MAX232CPE+Transfer+Chip+RS232+To+TTL&_sacat=0&_from=R40

General, Seagate, Dell, HDD,