Turns out that the HDD wasn't the issue [I've gotten it fixed]. I don't know if my "Solution" is going to help anyone else at all... After doing all the troubleshooting steps mentioned above and getting no confirmation that the errors were fixed, I was just like "To Duat with this!" and just re-imaged the machine with the custom image again, just in case, even though the first re-imaging hadn't fixed the issue.  And now it's fixed. It works. I have no idea what was actually broken, I have no idea how it was fixed, but hey, the clients don't need to know that I fixed this by accident 
Hello all, I have searched various places to find a solution to my specific problem, to no avail. thus, I am posting here in the hopes that someone might have an idea of a solution for me. I have a windows machine in our IT system that is stuck in a boot loop. It was giving several BSOD's, and I traced the BSOD's to a faulty driver.  BSODs: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (igdkmd64.sys), KERNEL_MODE_HEAP_CORRUPTION, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED I started by investigating the problem file from the first BSOD. since it was a driver file, and I couldn't boot into Windows due to it boot looping, I used cmd to delete the file, and replace it with a new version of the file from Dell (the correct file, I checked). But that did not fix the issue and I was still getting the BSODs. So, I decided to replace ALL the drivers by deleting them all and using cmd to copy over a brand new set of drivers from another machine (same model machine). This managed to clear the BSODs and get me to the login screen, but then the computer had a bizarre issue I've never seen before, where after any key press or button click it would return to the login screen, showing the time only. There was no way to sign in, shut down using the on-screen buttons, or do anything, since any key press would pulse the machine back to the login screen with only the time showing. So, I decided to reinstall windows; we'd had a custom system image installed at that point. This reinstallation was a fresh installation of Windows 10 Education. After the installation was complete, the machine returned to Boot looping and giving a few BSODs, but fewer than before: BAD POOL CALLER and 0xc0000225.  So, I decided to reinstall the BIOS. Now I couldn't get into the main Windows to run any form of installer, so I downloaded the correct BIOS file from Dell's website (Vostro_3471_3671_Inspiron_3471_3671_1.7.0.exe). Since I couldn't run it any other way, I managed to get system recovery to open cmd as Administrator, and with the file on an external USB, cd to the file's location and start it. Cmd then spit back an error: This version of [filename] is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. I tried renaming the file, moving it onto the machine's main drive, using various arguments to the cmd start command, to no avail. I then tried using older versions of Dell's prvided Bios: 1.2.0, 1.3.0, 1.5.0, 1.6.0, all to no avail. The computer's current BIOS version is 1.2.0.    Now, with all that context out of the way: Is there any way to either find a BIOS installation file that will work with Windows 10 Education and be installed on the machine, or is there some other way beyond cmd to force the machine to accept the BIOS installation?  
Correct BIOS installation file not recognized by Windows