Help, advices, tips, ideas needed, M17x r1 black screen on startup

Suddenly today my M17x r1 stopped working. When I press the on button keyboard lights show normally, fans start normally, but the screen stays black no splash screen, no bios messages, nothing. only black screen. If I try turning it on without power adapter it beeps ( as it does normally when on battery power) and if I press Fn F12 the T-pad lights turn off as expected, so maybe motherboard is ok, but I don't get any video, just black screen. I'm out of the warranty period. Any ideas? things to check? could support help me and fix it ( paying for it offcourse) or I'm doomed and with a dead/useless $4k plus laptop???

I'm depressed, upset and dissapointed so any help would be greatly appreciated, I love my laptop but now that I need to get it fixed without warranty and there is no physical store to go for help as an apple or something I feel frustrated and thinking it was not a good buy.

 

Try to do a power drain (remove battery and AC adapter, press and hold power button for 10-15 seconds), it may do the trick.

You can also try to connect an external monitor, if it shows image your LCD might be broken.

 

Thanks for your reply Luis! I will try the power drain option. I tried to connect to my tv via hdmi but nothing showed, I pressed Fn F6 several times to send video to my tv but it showed nothing. I don't have any other hdi (nor display port) monitors to test it out, maybe I should buy a VGA cable to connect to my dell monitor wich only has DVI (wich M17x does'nt have) and VGA. Or if it did not work on the tv it will not work on a monitor for sure? should I test the vga thing or not waste money on a cable I will never use again???

If the power drain option works I will report here, If not what are the chances of getting dell/Alienware to fix it (charging me of course) since My warranty period is over???

OK, just checked the power drain and it does'nt help. I tried turning it on with battery and no AC adapter to check if it recognized I was on battery power and it did. It beeps normally telling me I am not using AC adapter but as expected the screen remains black. Do I need to be on windows to use the external monitor? ( in that case I will have to remember which option to press (F1 or F2) to bypass the AC adapter warning and boot to windows. I tried connecting it to my hd tv while it was most probably on the bios screen (AC adapter warning) can it send video to an external monitor if not in windows yet?

 

Yes, it will send video to the hdtv before windows has booted. Has it only beeped when on battery power? If there is a serious problem, the notebook will beep to signal it has a problem. It may also flash the CAPS/NUM/SCROLL lock lights as well to signal it has a problem. Here are the two web pages that detail the beep codes and led codes:

Alienware Beep Codes Table | Dell

Alienware

 

Thanks radji for the links I'll fave them for the future, just checked them and nope none of those beeps or flashes happen, it looks just as it does normally. The alien head is the color I used in Alienfx it's eyes blink as usual, reading the HDD, cpas lock etc are all off as usual.

And it does not beep at all if I'm plugged to the AC adapter. Yesterday it only showed a black screen and I never heard windows sound so I thought it was not loading. But today It was able to start windows, I figured that since it was turned off without windows shutdown ( because of the black/no video) screen it was maybe stopping on the typical: your windows did not shut down properly....etc so I pressed the down arrow to select the "start windows normally or something like that I remembered was the second option. after that the windows sound played so I waited a few seconds to be sure the windows user/password screen was active and I typed my password and the windows start sound played so one thing I know now for sure is that it can start windows normally but video output is dead.

I tried to connect via hdmi to my hdtv and it does not work, I tried connecting to one of my DELL's monitors via VGA and did not work either. So not only the screen shows nothing but the video output is sending nothing. I could confirm ( with my wife's M15x) that it does not show video on external monitor during bios startup but as soon as windows login screen is active it shows video on the external monitor without even using the Fn F6 combination. But on my M17x, after I managed to start windows (knowing it for sure because of the sounds), it showed no video at all on the external tv nor monitor.

Another thing that surprised me today is that suddenly in one restart the screen stopped showing black and started showing flashy RED, GREEN, BLUE, GREY, BLACK in that order. It did that fast flashy sequence of colors 4 times then the same sequence of colors slowly showing one after the other ( no flashing) and then back again to the flashy sequence. After 3 or 4 repetitions of that same flash no flash sequence it turned off. After it did that colorful showoff for the first time each time I turn it on it does it again.

Could this flashy behaviour be some kind of code too? or simply a way destiny is telling me the video component of the motherboard or the video card are dead?

Any thoughts?

 

No, that is not some sort of code. But it does tell us something. It shows the LCD still does work, it isn't completely dead, but it could also still be the problem. Next thing to try is to remove your GTX 260m card from the system entirely and then try to boot up. That will tell us if the discrete card is causing the issue, or if the iGPU or video bus is what's malfunctioning.

EDIT: FWIW, my R2 will display the BIOS splash screen and POST info on my HDTV as well as the laptop LCD when I boot up.

 

I'll try to find a tutorial over here in the forum on how to detach the video card. I see some of the screws as like little stars and not the typical screws so I'm not quite sure I could do it at least until I can find a place to buy those kind of screwdrivers. Thanks for your time and help radji!!!!!

 

The star-like screws are torx screws. Any standard screwdriver bit set will carry those bits. You loosen and tighten them just as you would a Phillips head screw.

 

You shouldn't need to remove the torx screws when removing the graphics card. I happen to have taken out my graphics card myself a couple of months ago when giving it a spring clean and the Dell manual was a great help (see below).

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/M17x/en/SM/sm_en.pdf

 

Hey buddy. I first want to say I am sorry that you are having the problem that you are experiencing w I th your alienware. Second of all I want to say I used to have to same problem with my alienware m17x. But the good news is mine is working as good as new now with 0 problems. What happens is the soldering on your video card becomes seperated. There is a solution to this issue and I can help you if you are still needing a fix and are a bit tech savvy.

 

+1 for the help. If the PC is still in warranty we can also send replacemente parts