I had this problem last week that caused my hard drive to fail and I lost 700GB of data and had to buy a new hard drive.  I'm not impressed with Dell.  They said my computer is out of warranty (only 2 years old) and that they couldn't help me at all.

Microsoft did a push update that is conflicting with either Windows 8/8.1 or Microsoft Office.  The reason I say this is because my friend bought a brand new computer with Win8.1 on it last week.  All he had installed on his computer was a version of Office 2010 and his computer crashed too.

I had Office 2010 on my machine as well.  So this leads me to think Microsoft is messing up people's machines and since we got our OS from Dell, they won't help us.  Now Dell is basically telling us we are out of luck.

You will have to reinstall Windows from a disc or bootable USB.  Just press F6 I believe to get to your blue BIOS screen, then go to BOOT and make sure USB and/or CD/DVD are set up to boot BEFORE your HDD.  Then reboot with your OS media plugged in, or inserted in DVD and away you go man.

Thanks DELL and MICROSOFT!

Computer warranties are almost never longer than 1 year, no matter who you buy them from - HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus are all 1 year warranties (standard - you can pay for a longer one with all of them).

Dell is consistently rated as the best and easiest OEM to work with on replacement media.  It may not be ideal, but going with someone other than Dell for that reason won't help you.