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    Black Screen after windows logo - Graphics Card

    Discussion in 'Alienware M15x' started by fadedh22, Aug 30, 2011.

  1. fadedh22

    fadedh22 Newbie

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    Hi everyone, I tried searching the forums for a situation like mine however it seems none of the solutions I have tried worked.

    Here is my situation:
    I recently did the fun rebuild on my M15x with adding an SSD to the optical drive bay. Fun stuff. Worked good, reinstalled windows 7 on the SSD etc. Everything worked good. Then I found out the SATA for the optical drive is only SATA I, which is pointless for a SATA II SSD.

    Next step, moved the SSD to the original HDD spot and the HDD in the optical drive. Upon starting the system up I got a black screen (no cursor, sound). Booted into safe mode, disabled the graphics card (ATI 5850) where I was able to boot again into normal windows w/o a graphics card enabled. I uninstalled the old drivers and installed the latest driver from AMD. Rebooted, same black screen. Power drained 5,000 times and reseated the graphics card plenty of times. Installed the driver from dell for the graphics card ... nothing but black.

    So question is: is the graphics card fried? It worked before the rebuild and the device manager recognized it as an ATI Radeon 5850. What kind of steps should I do now? Besides throwing it in the oven of course

    Update- In systems configuration I disabled AMD External Events Utility in the Boot tab and restarted. It worked! The screen was back to HD but it seemed pretty slow which was weird. I then did a performance check through windows which is where the screen froze. Restarted and had a black screen again after the windows logo. Argh this is frustrating

    Specs:
    Alienware M15x
    Windows 7
    AMD Radeon 5850
    Intel i7 740QM
    Samsung 470 SSD 128GB
    Seagate 500 GB HDD
    8 GB RAM
     
    fadedh22, Aug 30, 2011
    #1
  2. The Revelator

    The Revelator Notebook Prophet

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    This may sound stupid, but is there any chance that you're booting from the HDD in the optical drive? Did you change the BIOS boot order after swapping the disks?
     
    The Revelator, Aug 30, 2011
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  3. fadedh22

    fadedh22 Newbie

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    Yea I may have not said it clearly in the op because I glazed over the fact. I originally had the SSD in the optical drive and the HDD in the original location. I installed windows fresh onto the SSD, installed all drivers and programs, formatted the HDD and all was good. It was booting fine from the SSD and the graphics card was working normal. I decided to change the SSD to the original HDD location to take full advantage of the SATAII Drive. It was fine after that messing around is when it got into trouble.

    I double checked the boot menu in the BIOS and it is booting from the SSD.

    A few other solutions I tried that I didn't mention and didn't work:
    Windows startup tool
    Windows recovery - earlier date before moving disks around
    BIOS Diagnostics

    Thanks for the help!
     
    fadedh22, Aug 31, 2011
    #3