Went through this same thing.

Finally with dpilot83 and others help I downloaded ISO file from the internet and made my own Windows 7 clean install on a new hard drive. Got away from Dells bloat ware and other idiosyncrasy's too.

Kept the original Dell hard drive as a new out of the box in case I have a crash.

I had no luck making the back up discs and getting them to work.

Follow the saga below.

http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=381087

http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=381865

http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=382212

http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=385079