URGENT support Alienware M17 Hardware Issue

Hey guys. new to the forum!!
There is no way to keep this story short so ill start from the beginning.
Before Xmass my M9750 died. probably a mainboard failure. Decided to get myself a M17 off ebay with success. I did a few upgrade like adding a second 3870 ati for crossfire and a core2 duo extreme. it was all fine all good. This is where stuff starts going wrong. I had the stupied idea to replace the m17 keyboard tray with the m9750 thinking that it was the same. reason why i did this was because i had a bunch of cool surf stickers on the old one and i dident want to rip any of them off. After taking apart the whole chassie i found myself with a problem. the screw wholes dident line up with the m17. So i gave it up and put the orginal keyboard tray back in. connected all the cables correctly and BOOOMM the power button wouldnt react at all!!! Massive panic because i only had the laptop for a day! after play around with the cable of the power pannel i had the lights go on for 1 second and then off. not enough time to hit the button itself to start it up. after 5 hours of fidling around and try both the m9750 power pannel and the m17 panel i found a temporary solution.
Instead of putting the power panel cable on its correct side i fliped it around and pushed it into the socket which triggerd the laptop to turn on instantly. I was really really happy about this because that meant that i dident cause any hardware damage during dismantling it.
So keeping a long story short I managed to start it up but the center power panel still had no power. Another odd thing is that the Mouse pad does NOT WORK either!!! keyboard is fine. im typing on it right now. I got two theorys here. Either I busted both the power pannel socket and the mouspad socket (No visable damage on both) or there is a chip fried that powers both the mouse pad and the center power panel. I need a alienware technician to confirm this for me that they both run over the same circut but i dont have a alienware account to ask. The cables cant be the problem because i tried it with two diffrent ones. What i havent tried yet is to connect the m9750 mouse pad to the m17. should i? I really CANT buy a new motherboard right now because i just got this laptop.
Looking forward to ur guys oppinion on this issue. For now ill keep on turning it on with my method and ill try to keep the laptop on as long as possible.
Cheers for the help ahead!
Svare

 

(wall of text hits you for 255000 crit damage... jk)

Recheck your connections, you may have damaged some of those flat cables. Did you actually try to power up the lap with the m9750 keyboard connected?

may i tell you that you had a bad idea?

 

I don't think you "fried" anyrthing.
Try removing your CMOS battery for a while,remove any power source and press the on/off button for like a half a minute to drain everything out.

And just a heads up next time you dissmantle any electrical device(not only laptops) remove any power source(in your case battery/power cable)
Cheers

 

cables look all good. ill try to drain all the power. when i took the chassie appart of course i took the battary and charger out!!!! ill try that with the CMOS in a bit and let you guys know. cptxabaras why should i try the m9750 keyboard if the m17 keyboard works. what i might try is to just connect the mousepad cable of the m9750 and see if that works.

 

try the power drain

thenyou may vade disconnected the mouse pad when playing around the keyboard i recal the mouse pad was going through some ised place when i took the whole laptop apart

 

update on the situation guys. the power drain WORKED!!! power button works again!!! yeeeh. sum reason the led lights dont work on the panel but thats no big deal. the mouse pad on the other hand still dosent react. kinda tired now so ill take care of that tomorrow. the usb mouse does its job for now

 

alright. so the problem is not solved. woke up this morning and it was doing the same thing again!! With the diffrence that it wouldnt even charge the battary.
luckly i got 2 extra ones and tried both of them. they work. the 1st battary must of died overnight or something. very wired. at least we know now that its not the control panel or the cable. It has to do something with the power that runs through the laptop. Im using the original charger that came with the laptop. Yesterday i put it to sleep instead of shutting it down. woke up and it was still in sleep mode because of the blue light on the front cover. tried to hit the power button but it wouldnt do a thing. removed the battary and did the power drain method again. plugged in a diffrent battary and for a second both the cd drive light and the front cover lights went on for a second. This is all very very odd guys and im running out of ideas.

 

to start it up i have to drain the power everytime!! any ideas?

 

hello again guys..
sum time has passed but the problem still presists. I tried a couple new methods to figure out what the problem is with the laptop. I replaced the CMOS battary and i still kept on getting CMOS checksum bad. The power botton and led panel still dont work. I even tried with a diffrent motherboard and still the same problem. At the boot screen i get the following messages

error- Check time and date
error- Cmos checksum bad
Video bios shadow
CPU bios shadow and soo on...

the CPU and gpus are pretty much new.
I tried to flash the BIOS to the OCZ version but that only had the consequence that i locked myself out of windows because of validation problems. I dont know what to do guys anymore. I should mention the HDs are flash drives. i put about 1k into the pc in the last months with the result that its still faulty.

Im open 4 any kind of ideas.
cheers

 

Svare,

You need to give up on 'mixing n' matching' parts... The M9750 and M17 were developed by two different ODM's - they're not interchangeable.

First, remove the CMOS battery, AC Adapter and main battery...

To get things righted, you need to again disassemble the laptop and disconnect and reconnect the touchpad, keyboard, and touch sensitive panel. Instructions are available here: Alienware : The Best Custom Built Gaming PC for the Ultimate PC Gamer!

Once the dissassembly/re-assembly is done, install the CMOS battery. Prior to installing the main battery or AC adapter, press and hold the power button for about 20 seconds. Then, reinstall the main battery and reconnect the AC adapter.

Assuming you haven't actually damaged any hardware, the laptop should boot. At first boot immediately enter the BIOS and select the option to restore factory defaults.

I'd STRONGLY recommend flashing to the official Alienware-branded BIOS. Even though the OCZ shared the same ODM, there are differences.

 

the mobos are identical in the alienware and OCZ version

the only issue i could find is that with the ocz version you can no longer shutdown the alien head led



formt eh m17 to the m9750 s that the m9750 was designed befor the arima was bought by flex and the m17 was flex designed by it's arima division

so in an ideal world part should be comaptible but we are not in an ideal world