Hi everyone,
I recently purchased an XPS 13 Signature Edition (7 days ago) and love this laptop but have had numerous problems with it out of the box. I had Windows 10 Home preinstalled and ran Microsoft's big update for Windows 10 called Threshold or 1511 from Windows Update. After this update finished the laptop was no longer able to detect any network adapter hardware. I wasn't able to install the driver for the adapter without the installation wizard failing and the Device Manager included nothing regarding the network adapter anymore.
Instead of trying to troubleshoot this any further I just decided to format the computer again. This is where things went down hill quickly. I will admit, I don't know much about UEFI, Secure boot or GPT, so I think my lack of understanding potentially caused the following problem.
I loaded a bootable OS iso on a USB drive and plugged it into the computer. The issue was the computer wasn't detecting the thumb drive. Upon further research, I had to enable Legacy Option Roms and disable Secure Boot in the BIOS (UEFI). Upon doing this I was able to see the USB drive under Legacy Boot after pressing F12.
When I go to the point where it asks if I want to create a new partition or format current partitions I tried formatting the main partition but received an error message stating windows can't be installed because it's a gpt partition type. What I did afterwards was delete all 4 partitions listed.
The problem was I did not want to install an OS using the old school partitioning method. I wanted to be able to use UEFI, GPT, and so on. I am not sure what happened after removing those partitions but now I can't doing anything to this computer.
I am unable to create a partition when Legacy Boot is enabled because I am told no hard drive could be found. So I went back and enabled Secure Boot and disabled Legacy Boot Options rom so I could install windows on a UEFI partition. I even got a UEFI recovery media drive from Dell and I cant use any of the restore/recovery features without errors. Everything results in a generic error message or states a required partition is missing.
If I run ePSA Pre-boot System Assessment (Dell Diagnostics) I receive an error message stating Hard Drive - Not Installed. The odd thing is the BIOS can see my hard drive but nothing else seems to see it. If I run Device Configuration from the boot screen my hard drive is also listed as Non-Raid Physical Disks: PCIe 1.0, PM951 NVMe Samsung 256GB S29NNXAG919783, 238.6GB. I even restored the BIOS back to Defaults and Factory Settings.
Would anyone be able to offer some assistance on how to fix this? I am stuck one what I can do from here and speaking with Dell Technicians over the phone didn't get far either.
