AW17R1 need some help with drivers

Hey everyone,
I own an alienware 17 r1 everything was running perfectly. Ive been playing around with benchmarks and managed to install some software that corrupted my system. I was unable to use the windows uninstall feature and got myself in a loop where i could get into safe mode but not into a normal boot. In my haste i decided now was a good time to do a clean install of windows 8.1

I used my recovery media and have gotten things partially installed, but im confused on how to get all the proper drivers reinstalled. In particular the amd driver for my discrete card.

I went to the dell site, and have entered my service tag which shows 18 various drivers for all the components in my system. at first i was just trying to get the chipset drivers to install, and many of these files on the dell site say they will automatically install after downloading. after a couple of failed attempts i decided to use the option to create a list and get all 18 files downloaded at once and put them on a mem stick should this happen again.

I assumed initially that i could use the auto detect feature of the dell site and that by going one by one through the installs it would quit showing that i still needed that driver, so either they are not automatically installing like the site says they should, or i am ddoing something wrong.

All i have to browse the forum on is an old tablet, ive gone page by page back through the forum trying to find some relevant posts regarding this and am just frustrated at this point. What i thought would take a couple hours has now taken all day trying to use the dell site. Ive resorted to downloading every file individually and saving them locally and am realizing it will be many hours to complete.

I know this shouldnt be this difficult and that i must be missing something simple and obvious.

Id really appreciate any links to posts that could help me get these drivers installed in the proper order as clean as possible. I have the 4710mq processor and the AMD m290 card i believe. Im confident i have the drivers downloading now its just going to take a long time for all the files to finish. This is for a windows 8.1 install not 10.

Thanks for your time and any help would be appreciated.

Edit, im now getting some errors on the dell site saying "the dell download manager is unable to begin the file dowload because the file is not present on the dell servers". For the network drivers.

 

Hello, I just installed Windows 10 on my M17X (All powerful) . Works fine, some of the drivers are requiring an update like the vide drivers for 280M's. I can't find drivers that work anywhere, I guess it's at the end of its life cycle, which sucks because this laptop can still run anything, even after 7 years.

 

Well i finally gave up and went to bed about three am. I woke up this morning and decided to try again with a clear head. Not sure what i have done but when i turned on the machine this morning it would not boot and gets stuck with a message "preparing windows recovey" and it just hangs.

I attempted to use my usb recovery media and it no longer quickly boots into respawn, but rather it loads files and then hangs, after about 10 minutes an error message is displayed saying there is not a drive large enough to recover to and gives me the option to quit.

I went into the bios and ran diagnostics, everything passes. I also verified that the bios sees both my 1t hard drive and my 80gb mSATA cacheing drive.
Wondering if my recovery usb had been corrupted i then tried the recovery dvd with a similar result.
I am still under warranty so i called a service tech. He had me go through essentially all the same steps with the same result. He then decided we should try a clean install from the windows 8.1dvd. It will boot to the dvd but just hangs. At this point there is an open ticket and they are sending an onsite tech to replace the primary hd.

The service call was pleasant. A lot of what he had me do took time. Im incredibly frustrated with myself and not sure how i managed to kill the hard drive by installing drivers in an incorrect order, or what changed overnight.

Im tempted to just go purchase a new ssd and try a clean install again myself. But really cant afford to and am fearful that id end up in the exact same situation.

Thanks for reading, between trying to search the forum on my phone and tablet, poor eyesight, and lack of sleep im just not finding the answers. Im not sure how to take the only response in the thread, if it was someone who was also looking for help or an implication that my machine is outdated and that i should be running win 10.

I know that there are incredibly smart people here and generally speaking a lack of responses means that either my situation is so incredibly simple that people are sick of answering the questions or that the situation is rare and nobody has the easy answer. Being it likely the former rather than the latter i appologize to the experts in advance, but id be grateful if someone held my hand and pointed me in the right direction. ive searched and attempted to find the answers, but the tools i have, cell phone browser and old galaxy tablet compounded with the fact that i dont even know if im asking the right questions have me stumped.