M18X R2 A07 Bios Overview + OLD IRST OROM ...

My fresh M18X R2 I received several days back, contains A07 BIOS, yet I dont know if you can notice any differences in BIOS menus , but one thing for sure IRST remains same old outdated version... WHY...

DELL ... WHY NO NEW IRST OROM...?!?

 

Hello Everyone,

Agree, 11.6 OROM would be nice

Thank you,
Monnie

 

No worries, as soon as A07 or its derivative becomes downloadable, there are people who will add RST option rom to it for all of you. My R2 is running 11.5.0.1582 orom on A03 thanks to them ("Hello" to sv7 from techinferno o/).

BTW, any 11.2.x or higher option rom will do. Apparently RAID trim has been introduced already in RST 11.2.x.

 

it has been read and its uploaded for download, not sure if it has been noticed, just ROM file of M18X R2 A07

Alienware-A07.rom

 

Hi just thought that I might add to this tread rather then start a new one. I have just gotten my M18x r2 as a replacement laptop with the above Bios and Im running 2 intel 510 250gb ssd's in raid 0 everything works well until I add the 1T Samsung HDD that came with the laptop. What I get is computer is freezing during post and the times that it dosn't freeze is slow boot times.
Am I right in saying that it could be the old irst orom. I have done a few tests using different HDD's (I did get things to work when I would use all standard HDD no SSD).

Can someone please HELP!!! Dell told me to flash BIOS to A03 which I said that would not be good from what I have read.

 

Heres a good reason why I think dumbdumbs thread was helpful.

Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk 2

 

I did hear about why one shouldn't flash from A07 to A03 from dumbdumbs thread. But no one on there had the problem that I have. I might just take the 1T out till a new BIOS come out that I can use.

 

Regardless of what the Dell support rep told you on the phone, you wouldn't have been able to flash A03 over A07 anyway, unless you performed a blind flash, which is something you wouldn't ordinarily do anyway.

At what stage during POST does it freeze up?

Since it does run sometimes, what version of RST are you using?

Do you move the laptop around between it working and not working? I'm thinking it could possibly be a dodgy cable or possibly loose where it plugs into the motherboard as the clips are pretty weak and easy to break.

 

same here even with single ssd in tray + 1TB samsung HDD, it gives me odd time very slow boot, lets say over 60seconds boot from SATA6GBs port SSD that makes read/write ~450MBs in benches ... LOL

It may as well be hardware design flaw not being bale to provide enough current/amps trough the tiny flex ribbon to the drives, due to certain configuration... may be wrong but looks like it, while lets take in to the account M17X users have no problem RAID'ing my type vertex4 drives M18XR2 has, also M18X R1 hasnt got that problem maybe due to different ribbon technical design?

 

What USB devices do you have plugged in during boot? I've seen a Steel Series mouse cause very slow bootup in the past as the microcontroller in the mouse was causing the USB controller to time out when scanning for devices during POST.

 

So I have done some more test's. I put 2 hitachi 750gb HDD in raid 0 and installed windows and drivers (all default) irst is 11.0.0.1032. everything running well, I then installed the 1T HDD and again all was good. I put my 2 intel ssd's in reinstalled windows with default driver's from the resouce disc and found that the boot time's were still slow but the computer isn't freezing as much. I have looked at the cable several times thinking that could be the problem but that looks fine. When the computer freezes it's when you see the alienware head and the red bar goes from left to right, before i reinstalled windows I was runing the 11.6 irst drivers. I forgot to mention that the 3rd HDD make clicking sound when booting.

 

nothing plugged in, just boots slow some times and some times normal quick... normal mean approx 10-15 seconds before I see my mouse cursor, and long when it takes up to a minute to see my cursor so I just put it this way as an example... now runing single SSD and single 1 TB HDD ... not happy about it

clicking noise may be there is not enough power coming to HDD so it fails spin-up and tries to reinitialize (considering your HDD is new and by no means faulty or starting to fail etc) , this would happen with some HDD drives plugged in to poor powered usb hubs you feel it spin up but it doesnt finish spinup and keeps clicking untill you either plug in aux usb power cable or reconnect it to USB port with no USB hub adapters involved...