A problem that happened to me twice on my m15x because of VISTA!

Hi Guys,

Sorry for being gone some more time!....This is just an information post that I wanted to share with all of you. If some of you have been reading my previous posts you may well be aware of the fact that I have not had smooth sailing with my m15x. Well my recent problem was a HDD outage after which I sent in mine for a replacement from AW. After installing the new HDD and all my data (a whopping 2.5 hr task) I breathed a sigh of relief and wishing bad times behind me looked forward to a fresh start on my laptop.

But guess what - barely a week into my new HDD I got hit again - I couldnt boot into Vista anymore . I had powered down normally and the next day when I switched it on, it booted all the way upto the loading screen (the one with the travelling progress bar and microsoft corporation on it). I had seen this before and got a sick feeling . Then I tried the usual - safe mode boot that went as far as CRCDISK.sys and then the windows repair options that got me as far as the loading screen!!!! - There was no way to do anything - basically you are locked out from ur own damn computer. Having received my new HDD just a few days earlier and one that checked out completely made me doubt that this was a HDD thing. So I ran some HDD diagnostics and voila- HDD is perfect. No bad sectors.. nothing! So then I researched a bit on the internet and came up with this:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2841505&SiteID=17

In summary - Vista will refuse to boot if the autoupdate service updates the PCMCIA firmware drivers. BE CAREFUL guys.

There are many more forum reports like this. This is just to let every1 with Vista out there to be more careful when allowing AUTOUPDATES to load your machine with updates. I had to reinstall everything from scratch and now keep monitoring my updates for Vista. If you have a second hard disk you can avoid a reinstall by mounting you affected HDD as a slave and manually tweaking the startup load. Change the name of the PCMCIA file on the list.

This should have been a general posting and not just for Alienware - But I own an AW and am more active here - so I just decided to post here. Hope this is useful.

 

Thanks Sabapathy +1

 

Could you report this problem to Microsoft? They will definitely look into it to see how widespread the problem is.

 

Things like this are precisely why i have windows update OFF.

 

Not sure about how you do that. But most of the information I found on this was available from the microsoft run forums. So I guess they must atleast have an inkling of an idea....

 

Sabapathy,

That's an interesting issue you had there. I'll be sure to pass this along to our product group. I take it you haven't had any problems since you reinstalled?

 

Nope - No problems as yet. But from now as a precaution I am making sure that I update only the security fixes from the autoupdate selections. Anything else that I dont want I just ignore.