M17x reboot at cold booting

Dear all,
I just got my new M17X, and I wiped out all the partitions on the hard disk and installed clean Win 7 ultimate on it. The problem is when I do a cold boot, the machine will reboot several times(usually 2) at the BIOS screen, and boot to win 7. I am not sure if there was such problem before I did the clean installation. (I did noticed there were two hidden partition before, which I wiped out later). Anyone had such problem before? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Is there any way that I can restore the hard-disk to "factory conditon?"
Thanks so much


Alienware M17x R2
--Intel Core i5 540M 2.53GHz (3.06GHz Turbo Mode, 3MB Cache)--4GB Dual Channel Memory (2x 2GB DDR3)--1GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5870--640GB Raid 0 (2x 320GB 7,200RPM HDDs)--8X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Drive,QuickSilver--Ordered Oct 1st 2010 from Dell.com

 

first do you have a area-51 m17 or the allpowerfull m17x?

 

it is a M17X

 

Can you post your specs?

 

Creat a sig for your account. It helps when you have issues we have a quick referance as to your specs. I'm assuming this is an R2 system. I would update your GPU VBIOS and drivers for the GPU. also update to the A09 BIOS if you havn't done so. That should solve your issues.

 

I put the spec in the signature. Thanks so much for everyone's help

 

Hi,
I flashed the A09 BIOS and the problem persists. Any other advice? Thanks so much for your help.

 

Oles chiefs.

You will need to update to dells new GPU drivers and then flash the Vbios after that. Then you should be golden oles.

Cheers.

 

Hi, I updated both new BIOS and new VBIOS. It still restart once before it shows the Alien face screen (and then everything fine). Any other advice? Thanks

 

Wow what a weird problem ey chiefs.

Hmmmssssss. So you power it up and then it loads. What does it show and load up till? Does it show the Alien splash screen and then load the windows 7 logo or when does it restart?

Try checking in the bios for enable quickboot. Enable that option and disable the option directly above it.

If it still fails try resetting your bios to default values exit saving changes and then see what happens?

Very strange indeed. Other than that without seeing it I'm not to sure. I would also recommend uninstalling your GPU driver and see if it does the same thing. Then install a new driver again. Either Dells or AMD 10.10 mobility.

If all else fails you might have to give dell/alienware a call. See what they have to say on the matter.

Cheers.

 

It like when I press the power button, the keyboard and all the other indicators light up, DVD drive gives some noise for 1 sec, screen turn gray and it shut down before showing the Alien splash screen. Then after this everything works fine. I'll play around with the BIOS and see what happens. Thanks a lot!

 

M17 Specs are :

Alienware M17x10 "R2" MS Windows 7 Home Primium 64
Bios A09
Intel(R) iCore 7 (TM) Q820 1.73GHz
4GB RAM DDR3 1333MHz
Dual AMD - ATi Radeon 5870 Video cards
1:HDD: Seagate Momentus XT 500GB
2:HDD: Seagate Momentus XT 500GB

Laptop worked great out of the box, as soon as I updated the BIOS it started to hang at shutdowns and reboots so it seems but in reallity it goes into sleep mode and goes into Dual screen mode. Talked to Dell rep - he says its a problem with ATi Radeon 5870 drivers, they think its the GPU goes into dual screen mode and blacks out the Laptop displays. The work around is to turn off the sleep mode both on battery and AC power. That seems to have temporarily solved this issue until ATi comes out with another version of the driver.

Has any one else experience the same issue?

Thanks

 

Something simular happened to me. The way I got around it was to boot into windows attatching an eternal monitor. This allowed me to boot into windows and see the screens. Then I had to reprogram the ATI drivers to always show up on the correct LCD Laptop screen. It was trial and error and allot of luck. Maybe this also works for you, if it really is the video card causing the issue.