Ugh! Why is everyone so mad at me? 
I'm not. I'm quite honestly just as confused by the aura of antagonism that has resulted from you not following irrelevant instructions.
I'll admit I was lazy and thought if the memory issue wasn't really giving me problems
What memory issue? (is this from the other thread on the other forum, or the suspicion of a memory issue for the non-booting issue you are having now?)
To the best of what I can understand here, there is another thread, somewhere on the internet that is not linked here at all (and thus I cannot refer to it) that you started about an issue you were having- this one, or at least a issue from before "this" one. Given the symptoms it appeared that somebody felt that a Memory Test would be helpful in diagnosing the problem. From the sounds of things, you've run the built-in Windows memory diagnostic, which, IMO, ought to be good enough for these purposes. If you want to shut everybody up you could burn
memtest86 to a disc, boot to it, and let it run for a number of hours. If there are any errors at all, then you have a problem, and we can work from there to diagnose your memory issues (which in and of themselves could be caused by PSU, motherboard, etc and other issues).
An educated guess on my part? You have no memory issues at all. For one thing, I just don't see how a memory issue would prevent windows from starting from the HD but still allow you to boot into a Linux distro and move files. The only common element for problems here seems to be the hard drive. Several Posts here recommend the usage of a Utility to check if this is the problem.
it's important to realize that for the most part none of the suggested tools are magical fix-it tools; they are merely diagnostic tools that help you- and in turn us- determine if there are problems with certain components, and advise appropriately.
why should I waste time testing it when I didn't want to open my computer?
Well, if there is a problem, not wanting to open your computer isn't going to make it go away!
I ran diagnostics and memory tests. They didn't find any errors. What else should I do?
No idea. a quick glance and all I can see is a recommendation to use "seatools" but as you noted yourself, that suggestion was based on the wrong machine. After that it was merely quoted and you repeated your concern about it not being a Toshiba, a specific concern which was never addressed.
suffice it to say that I, at least, am as concerned about this as you are.
As to your problem, though, What exactly have you copied? I would recommend at least copying the entire My documents folder, if nothing else.
Once you are sure you've got everything, you'll want to try a factory restore of the drive.
You can initiate the "Dell Recovery Restore Utility." by pressing Control and F11 at the same time during boot. (I would recommend just holding Control and tapping F11 during boot). Others have noted that they had to press and hold the "0" (zero) key during boot to get to the restore utility.
If you can't get anything to appear, you might need to get the recovery discs for the system. if you don't have those, you can fill out the forms
On the Dell website and have them mailed to you.
