Issue with M17x R4

I have been having an issue with my alienware that lead to a hard drive failure. for a span of about 6 months, i started having an issue where if i closed my laptop, let it cool down, then opened it again, it would act funky and not run properly. it would eventually start popping up the error "The instruction at xxxxx referenced memory at xxxx, the required data could not be written" for all the programs i had open, and would eventually BSOD (with the error STOP: 0x000000F4 (0x0000000000000003, 0xFFFFFA800F223R30, 0xFFFFFA800F223E10, 0xFFFFF80003504130). It was not very consistent, and seemed to be temperature based at times. sometimes it would start up ok after this, other times it acted like it could not find the primary hard drive. within a few restarts it eventually would find it. the last time though it seems incapable of finding it. in the BIOS it detects my secondary hard drive but not the primary, and switching the hard drives around has the same result, so it seems like my hard drive is dead at this point. There is also a soft single beep separated out from itself by a couple seconds when i turn on my laptop as well (a lot softer then what i remember the beep codes being, plus i can access the bios) and i don't know what that means.

Obviously i need to get a new hard drive at this point, but my question is that is there some underlying cause that will kill my next hard drive like the first one, or was all of this the result of a failing hard drive? The error i mentioned previously seems to me that there was an issue loading the saved data to RAM and that was what was causing the laptop to crash. SMART tests showed nothing wrong with the hard drive during this time of these errors as well.

 

can you run Dell's hardware check utility in the bios

 

HDD usually fail because of the movement and temperature and simply because they are mechanical and wear all the time. By all means, test the memory and your both HDDs with Dell tools (F12). It's a good time to replace the failed HDD with an SSD at this point as well. It will bring new life to your laptop and they came down in price a lot. Especially if you don't need too much space - 256GB/512GB. Usually 128GB or lower capacity SSDs are slower than their higher capacity siblings, so 250/256 is the minimum recommended SSD capacity.

 

yep i was planning on upgrading my primary HDD to a SDD soon anyways so it isnt the worst thing in the world that it died, though i wish i did a better job backing up certain things.

Is there any way to get back my old windows 7 on it or am i going to have to purchase a new OS? Also im running the extended test right now, if everything comes back good i should be good to go right?

 

your OEM key should be on the bottom of the PC. You could install with that using a win7x64 iso