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    Urgent Help! M17xR3 Does not recognize Hard drives

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by Jessica113, Mar 22, 2014.

  1. Jessica113

    Jessica113 Newbie

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    Hello forum members.

    During start up, I went to F2 (setup) and I accidentally pressed F9 (Setup Defaults) not knowing what it was.... Now my computer does not recognize any hard drivers and none of them are there. I'm not familiar with RAID, SATA, all the other things. I have a regular hard drive in the 0 slot and a ssd in the 1 slot. I went to "Boot device Priority" and only 'Network' and 'CD/DVD/BD' shows up. Please help me :(
     
    Jessica113, Mar 22, 2014
    #1
  2. Robbo99999

    Robbo99999 Notebook Prophet

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    Hi Jessica, that sounds bizarre! Normally by setting BIOS to Default that should cause no such problems to my knowledge. I'm hesitant to suggest any solutions, because I'm not sure, but maybe it might help if you 'reset' the system by removing the CMOS battery - there's a specific process for this, that I'm not familiar with, but hopefully someone who reads my post here might be able to chime in. Maybe re-flashing the BIOS would help too, although not sure how you would do that if you can't get into Windows. Hang fire for a while, and I hope some of my friends on here and other people will be able to give you some more specifics.

    My SSD went missing from my BIOS one time, and I found out that by simply leaving it on the BIOS screen for about 15 mins allowed for the drives to be recognised after restarting from the BIOS. So, you could give that a go - just leave it on the BIOS configuration screen for about 15mins, reboot & see if they're recognised.
     
    Robbo99999, Mar 23, 2014
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  3. johnfisher

    johnfisher Notebook Enthusiast

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    Try resetting the bios by unplugging the cmos battery
     
    johnfisher, Mar 23, 2014
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  4. MickyD1234

    MickyD1234 Notebook Prophet

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    Yeah it is kinda weird if you've never been in the bios before? The procedure for reset is to remove the coin cell (obvious when you see under the lower panel) then hold down the power button for 10 seconds. Reassemble and test. Expect a beep code on first startup as the date/time will be reset to the default.

    I have seen drives disappear when people are trying out the win 8 specific options in the bios (eg: fastboot) but I don't know if dell ever added win 8 to the R3 bios? I would think not since the R4 was the first win 8 offered by dell...

    Good luck ;)
     
    MickyD1234, Mar 23, 2014
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  5. Robbo99999

    Robbo99999 Notebook Prophet

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    I'll make a copy/paste note of that process MickyD, I might need to do that one day!
     
    Robbo99999, Mar 23, 2014
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  6. Alienware-L_Porras

    Alienware-L_Porras Company Representative

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    Normally when you set the BIOS to default settings it will not boot, but the drives disappearing from the boot manager?? That's really weird.
    Try clearing the CMOS as suggested above, that should do the trick.
     
    Alienware-L_Porras, Mar 27, 2014
    #6