Two M17X-R2 problems...

So, I have an M17X-R2, 4 GB of DDR1066 ram, BIOS A09, Crossfire 4870s, Win 7-64

Problem 1
When I bought the system, the boot time was among the fastest I'd ever seen on any computer ever. I was amazed at the cold to full boot sequence.

I reinstalled the OS awhile back, and now the boot time is horrendous. Like 2 full minutes to get to functional. I've tried looking for bad drivers, and none are apparent. Nothing shows on the Device Manager as not working, no broken icons, etc. When I did the reinstall back then, I had loaded all the drivers off the Alienware CD with the system and many of them from the support website.

Any ideas on finding the issue / speeding up the boot? I've thinned down the msconfig boot list and it has not helped.



Problem 2
I cannot run a checkdisk on my system. I can defrag my platter drive just fine, and use Intel tools on my SSD boot drive, but I cannot checkdisk the boot SSD.

I can tell it to run a CHKDSK the next time Windows starts. When I restart to let it happen, it freezes at the "countdown to cancel" message and never actually runs the CHKDSK.
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Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this or what might be wrong? I use my system heavily every day for gaming, movies, etc, and it seems to function just fine. It simply cannot CHKDSK and it boots crazy slow. Thoughts?

Thank you all,
Armin

 

Hello,

i think i can only help you with the second issue since i'm not familiar with SSD, maybe you are missing an SSD update. But i had this problem aswell, that chdksk would freeze on 1sec and act weird at all, could not skip it sometimes, not responsive.

I used this Hotfix from Microsoft, please read:
Help and Support

Download it here, if you can't find the link on microsoft :
KBHotfix 975778 (Click on Download File)

That worked for me with chkdsk and it is now responding as it should when chkdsk occurs, good luck.

 

Secure Delete the entire SSD, then reformat, and reinstall.



That will give (litterally) a clean slate.

On the clean install, make sure AHCI and TRIM are enabled. Otherwise SSD performance will dip (well, after a while).

 

My SSD is set in AHCI and Trim, and I run the Intel Toolbox every week religiously.


I am trying to install the hotfix above but it says it is not for this version of Windows (7 Pro 64 bit).


I bought and used Driver Genius and the boot go a couple seconds faster, but still comparatively very slow.

 

Awww sorry, grabed the x86 one, my bad.

Here is the Hotfix which should cure your chdsk upon start issue and it will behave like you want again:
Windows6.1-KB975778-x64.msu - The Chkdsk.exe program does not start correctly on a Windows 7-based computer

You still want to do a complete chkdsk (CMD -> chkdsk /f -> reboot) once and see what errors show up, cheers

 

Great, the CHKDSK issue is now fixed. Thanks guys!