Help with Dell Dimension XPS 8500 desktop system
Hello fellow members of AO. I have a Dell Dimension XPS 8500 with Windows 8 desktop. 5 days ago, my system was "supposedly" hit by lighting, when I was out of town. The system shows the "DELL" logo and it displays "Automatic Repair" then goes to a black screen. The system is plugged into a backup power supply unit.. Anyways,
I ran a Dell diagnostics on the entire system and a red X showed up next to hard drive only. However, in the BIOS it detects the faulty hard drive. I took out the faulty hard drive and I installed it in another system. It detects in the BIOS but hard drive does nothing.
I purchased a Seagate 1TB hard drive from Best Buy today for 75 bucks (same one that was in my Dell) , I created a Bootable thumb drive from another system running windows 8 same make and model system. I installed new hard drive, placed thumb drive in USB port and nothing I changed boot sequence to boot from thumb drive first. My system didn't come with any cd's (recovery disks/driver disk or any OS cd's) i need to get windows 8 installed on my new hard drive, however, I don't have a windows 8 disk. Again, I created a bootable thumb drive with windows 8 (takes 16gb to do it) but didn't work.
My questions are #1. How can I get Windows 8 installed on my new empty hard drive if I don't have a windows 8 cd? I don't wanna go out and buy Windows 8 software (money is kind of tight at the moment) #2 I just ordered Dell recovery disks for free through Dell a couple of days ago they should be here either today or tomorrow. Also, my warranty expired 2 months ago, they can't help me unless I buy an extended Dell warranty (im not doing that) Will the Dell disks fix this issue? What other options do I have? Thanks, Mike.
