After getting Dell capable recovery discs and drivers, etc., I was able to return the PC to a booting one. It did however, clean out the previous old cloned partitions. It's NOT a day-1 return to a Dell bundle setup but a working system PC. The recovery and test partitions did get removed. Upon adding the old HD as a 2nd HD, it would only see the those 2-partitions, the main OS one unrecognizable in windoze. Yeah, I could probably retrieve some data under Linux but I'm not there for recovery but h/w fix. i explained that and offered services that provide that. The long slug of getting the PC and running has more tools into the bag and another lesson in that nothing is typical, surprises are present.
My recovery discs allowed MS authorization after procedure. Next, all those drivers got taken care of. Also, the actual fact a new HD had to be installed just added to the litany of issues to resolve. Let's not forget the prior loss of time of using different version OS install that didn't work as the bios prevented that. On this last visit it took 3.5hrs. to get it going and that's with hardly any pitfalls, just one step after another.
tada -----Willy phew, its done
A Dell XPS 9000 with Win7 Ultimate won't boot, it fails and then times out and remains blank. With power still-ON rebooting finds a missing HD, thus failed boot again. Turn power-OFF and cold boot it finds HD and tries to boot with same results. You have to cold boot to load any CDs as you need to tell to load CD drive.
Testing confirms the HD is bad and/or the Sys. Vol. is super corrupt. Win7 repair disc does some minor repairs but never fixes it totally.
Order new HD, cloned old to new. Since, this is a Dell, the 3 partitions it has are cloned(tried). The partitions are made, but only the Dell diag(test), recovery have data, and OS is blank or not even a 0 amount, just [---]. The cloning s/w Clonezilla generated the results. I then used the Win7 repair disc to find the recovery partition and use it, can't launch. Try it as an image from original HD, no go. I danced all around it, even clone to an another HD, then flash drive. Proving either the cloned s/w is bad from bad HD, or somewhat it wasn't entirely cloned correctly, though I thought that. When I reveal the partitions to check contents, it finds storage used, but folder is empty. I intend to re-install the Dell OS, but all that is hosed. i tried some other Win7 install and it got hosed(worked before). The idea was to have a bootable Win7 HD, then copy whatever data to allows user access and then after waiting for ordered recovery disks, install and have an all Dell working setup. Of course, no prior image or generated OS discs available.
I just find having what appears to be good recovery partition and tests are OK, that I can't launch it. maybe, the long hrs. were taxing, but I finally left after 4.5hrs.(2nd day) I had other tricks to try, but time wasn't there and best to have true working recovery disks before it all got hosed.
What do you think? Once i have a full recovery disk, it will work then and i still don't know why my install discs didn't allow it to finish install, but it did. I will post with final results. This is one of those head scratchers I come across now and then.
no tada -----Willy 
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