Hi eagles4585, Please try reinstalling the operating system again and this time delete all the partitions available and recreate a new partition to fix the issue. Note: Deleting partition table and recreating a partition will lead to data loss.
I currently have a Dell Latitude 3540 with Windows 8.1 installed.  I have found a disk to use to get 7 back (originally came with 7) but I come up with an error saying GPT partitions are not in the recommended order.  So I continue anyway and get after the registry step gets done it freezes on Starting Windows.  Please help me get past this step, and than you for your time.
Installing Windows 7 on Dell Latitude 3540