I have an Inspiron 15z 5523, bought brand new back in '13. I updated it to W10 last year, and everything worked fine. When I did the update, first thing I did was to create an image of the system in a USB drive for future reinstallation / recoveries.
Yesterday I wanted to format the laptop and do a clean reinstallation of the system. I plugged the USB drive and launched the recovery app. I selected the full format option, and the PC rebooted automatically. Problem is that from that moment on, it fails starting windows. The error reads:
"File: \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: The Boot Configuration Data for your PC is missing or contains errors."
After that, I have tried to repeat the process, forcing the system to boot from the USB drive. It will load the recovery app and start the process, but at 2% a different error message appears (code: Error 0x40001100200001005" and the process is interrupted.
I have read that this second error message usually appears when trying to do the recovery on an OEM drive, not the original one. However, this is not the case, I haven't changed anything in my PC.
I have also tried to install a W7 image I have, but when it gets to the point of selecting the drive where the OS will be installed into, the list appears empty. My laptop has an SSD drive and a HDD, though. I encountered this situation when trying to install Ubuntu a while ago.