The laptop came with a "Dell OS Recovery and Restore USB key" that has two partitions on it: 2.85GB and 4.36GB. Allegedly it should have an installable Windows 7, possibly through some "downgrade" from Windows 7.
I tried to boot from that USB dongle in a VM and had to apply the "VBoxInternal/CPUM/CMPXCHG16B 1" fix and use the VirtualMachine USB Boot Tool because otherwise I'd get this error: <<The I/O cache encountered an error while updating data in medium "ahci-0-0" (rc=VERR_ACCESS_DENIED)>> (apparently the Windows 8 that boots off of the dongle wants write access to the USB stick).
However, at this point I'm stuck: Windows aborts booting with an error message that clearly doesn't come from Microsoft:
Is this some copy protection BS that Dell added?Unable to continue the booting process. Some informations are corrupted or missing!!
I paid for the thing! How can I boot it in a VM?
(Dell's tech support was useless, as one might guess)