I just successfully helped out a friend using EditBINI, so I thought I'd share the experience here in case someone else might benefit from it.

I have a friend who has a Dell Inspirion notebook. Recently he upgraded his HDD from 80GB to 160GB. He used Acronis TrueImage to create an image of the 80GB HDD to an external USB drive, then clone it to the new HDD.

After doing that, his notebook wouldn't boot. It just says:



After mucking around with his machine for a few hours and googling for information, I finally did something that worked. Using EditBINI, I edited his BOOT.INI file from:



to



I think it has got something to do with a hidden partition on his original Dell HDD that wasn't cloned over to his new harddisk.

This was more than likely the Diagnostic tool partition. It is a hidden partition at the begining of the drive that contains the Dell only diag tools. That would explain why it was partition 2 originally but Partition 1 afterwards.

Are you still able to get into setup? If it's like the HP/Compaq systems you may want to go to the Dell site and see if you can get that downloaded and reinstalled. Then the image would probably work without the edit. He/You may also be able to run the Dell diags off of a CD and save the hassle of loading onto the drive.