M17xR1 won't boot up

I have an Alienware M17xR1 and the first black boot screen comes up as normal and tells me press F1 because my battery is just dead. I press F1 as usual and get a two options, option one being run startup repair which it says (Recommended) or start normal. When I select start normally, it gets to the Windows logo screen where it just sits there for a long time and restarts. Startup repair takes forever and finds nothing and when I click finish, it just restarts and nothing changes. Before I restarted it last night, it was really laggy and a movie I was watching would seize up every 15-20 seconds or so and sound rather digitally distorted.

I'm running memtest now to check if the RAM has finally had it, so I'll get back to you on that soon. I at least need to get my files off the computer, about 1TB worth and then I'll scrap the computer if it is found to be beyond repair.

Please help.

Computer passed memtest and a full array of diagnostics. I'm thinking the motherboard finally went bad. I'm considering pulling the HDD, I really need to back up the files on it.

 

Bump, I really need some help here!

 

Sounding like a hard drive failure? Can you give us any more information?

 

check this out.

 

Hey Brother Luis. The images seem to be broken on that support page.

I am 99% sure there is nothing wrong with your motherboard or you would be having far more serious problems.

Clear the CMOS, do a power drain and then make sure the BIOS is set to RAID (not AHCI). See how things go from that point. I think in the worse case scenario you need to do a clean Windows install. It certainly could be a bad HDD, but none of the symptoms you mention are strong indicators of a hardware failure. It seems more like a software issue. If you have trouble with the Windows reinstall, or you have boot failures--where you see messages like "Operating System not found" or other black screen messages and never get far enough to see the Windows loading screen--then you could have a bad HDD. The "sits there for a long time and restarts" sounds like a driver problem ending with a BSOD if your Windows settings are defaulted to the automatically restart option. If you press F8 between POST and Windows startup can you boot into Safe Mode OK? If you can run in safe mode without issues, you have a driver or Windows corruption problem.

Edit: Just to clarify something, because the mention of it is throwing me off a bit...

Is this a new problem that started with the rest of the issues, or is this something you are accustomed to because your battery is bad? If it's normal, mentioning it when describing the real issue represents a distraction from the troubleshooting that needs to occur.

 

I'll ask our team to update it In the meantime, this video could help out.

 

Thanks! That's a really good video series.