It is so frustrating when so much changes and so quick, too. It is expensive and annoying to try to figure out all the conflicts etc of hardware and software issues, but it certainly sound as though you have tried! Thanks for the post! Maybe Santa will bring a new PC laptop for Christmas--:-D!
You are soooooooooo nice :-). Laptop. Maybe. My gdaughter's crashed and she lost all her pics from England and a whole bunch of other things. I, who hate laptops and don't have a clue (maybe not if I can get one with what I described B4 and a mouse), sat down with the thing, figured out how to plug it in and turn it on, figured out that darn joystick or whatever it is, and was lost, wouldn't boot up no matter what I did, wouldn't let me go into safe mode, but somehow let me into the bios and tried a few things. Then it wanted to do a scan, so I thought this is hopeful, let's see if it will not do an abnormal termination, the scan did a bunch of stuff that scared me (correcting errors which later had to be fixed again) during the scan, but hey, I noticed that it appeared to have run to a normal termination.
So that told me it can't be the hd and I call the shop after already calling Dell and finding out probably what part it was, can't remember now, not the hd; the shop had already charged her $50 to tell her it had died and convinced them it couldn't have completely crashed.
So for another $90 (better than $1500-$2000 or so she was going to save up for she wanted her data so badly) the head tech (owner) got it working again. They had one cheaper option they could try first. She sat here and transferred her photos and other data via her Passport and was up and going again with a new laptop she'd bought. Oh happy day for her and me, too! Grandma was a hero. Of course, she also paid the bill lol.
I know you can dl data recovery software, but wouldn't have a clue what might work.
I used to work as a programmer years ago, wouldn't know it now, and never was good w/hardware and interfaces, etc. That's enough to bother you with. I'm tired from so many exciting things going on.