Older Alien not rebooting - explained as below.

Ok, so my Alien is old, I can't help it, it's four years old. I decided I would upgrade to Windows 8.1 and I did so successfully. All going well I was reinstalling my programs and drivers and decided to upgrade the BIOS - this was my mistake.

After upgrading the bios I got a blank screen, cursor flashing and then after about 6 or 7 minutes "No OS found" (or something like that).

So I decided I'd restore back to Windows 7 using my original Alien Respawn disc. This would only let me wipe the whole hard drive which I did and now I come up with a new error, BootMGR not found" (or words to that effect).

I'll happily restore back to Windows 7 and then re-upgrade to Windows 8.1 (it's only a day old) but I can't do this because I can't even restore at all.

Please advise what is it I can do?

Thanks (so much) in advance.

 

ok, I've managed to get as far as booting to recovery disk, but recovery doesn't occur. I can boot to ubuntu, but I can't operate it as it looks like this....sorry, can't insert image at moment. but let's just say, it's bad!

 

Which Alienware model is it? If you have access to another machine - as it seems this one is not in a position to be able to help currently I'm guessing, then can you get a hold of the either the latest bios (if that's not what you installed) or the bios version you had before to be able to effect say a boot cd / boot usb reflash of your bios? Just thinking of ideas.

I would have mentioned the recovery partition too but I've no idea if that's been wiped too or if it even had one (I'm not an expert so don't know if all Alienwares had one). Even if it does and is still there, the lack of a boot manager will stuff you up.

However... there are ways and means to boot if the recovery partition is there still but of course there is no boot manager. If you have grub - if I remember correctly there are ways and means to be able to tell it via a command line interface to switch to a particular partition and boot that (if the recovery partition exists and is intact still).

 

Ok - I have got this far - I am now in a position for the computer to find an image for a system restore. My Alien Re-Spawn doesn't work. The Windows 7 Premium disk doesn't work. So what am I left with doing? I downloaded an iso image, used imgburn - but that's still not picking it up. I need an image and I need a working image that this computer can find. Any help? Please?

 

Well, these errors you mentioned are due to the changes in BIOS. If you want to install Windows 8.1 or 8 from a DVD, you need to go into BIOS and enable UEFI boot, secure boot and fast boot. If you want to install Windows 7 from a DVD, you need to change the same settings to Legacy (instead of UEFI), disable secure and fast boot. Also check if you have Raid/AHCI/Sata(IDE) set in your sata operation menu. Which model Alienware do you have and what BIOS version did you update to?

 

You were right about the Raid - that was the problem. Sorted now

It took a while, but I did a clean install anyway

All good, all working, all happy, just a whole day of fiddling around. But I am much, much wiser now

 

I'm glad everything is working as it's supposed to. You could have also used an USB key.