Alienware M7700 Motherboard replaced. Hardrives wont work

Hi guys.

left comp into shop to get fixed have to hard drives installed in computer had to get motherboard replaced now tech guy says hard drives cant be found on comp but they were working before hand no prob.

I vaguely remember seen a post about the same problem but I cant find it. I think there is a certain setting to activate them or something.

Can use help. Im lost without it. On a dell Insiron 1520 LOL

Thx from Ireland

 

If I'm understanding this right (and after reading it about six times I hope I am), you're using a Dell to access the forums?

and your AW M7700 is out of commission?

can I ask, did you check the AW support site?

 

Hi ya. ye you are right. sorry about bad spellings.

My aw is out of action due to the problem off hard drives not been recognised on the laptop. I cannot find any info on the aw site so thought someone here might know

 

care to elaborate the whole "HDD not being recognized"?

ah. don't you need to install HDD drivers (for the BIOS) at some point on the install?

 

/agree

"not being recognised" is a huge issue. with many problems that can fit it, and many solutions that can solve it, not all applicable to this case.

we need to know where it's failing, and what it says... I mean, if the drives aren't picked up by the BIOS, then obviously that's a big problem, with no easy answer... but if they're not picked up my windows setup, it could be something as simple as slipstreaming a driver into your windows install disk and trying again.

for now, we have no idea what could be wrong.

 

Hi lads. I just got onto the tech guy in the shop.

He said the 2 drives are been recognised in the bios alright but not on windows intself. I am sorry I dont have much info on this it is because I am not around the computer at the minute.


I just hope I dont lose everything on my drives

 

uhm. if he's saying windows isn't recognising the drives, he's probably talking about the windows installer, if that's the case, I'm not sure why it would matter. 'cause if he's reinstalling windows, you're about to lose all the data on those drives.

reinserting the drives and booting the machine (as per-normal), should result in the OS loading quite normally. due to the fact that the OS should already have all the necessary drivers installed.

Honestly, call him, tell him to stop trying to reformat the disk, and just let it boot. if it boots up with errors, then you'll HAVE to reformat. in which case, I'd recommend using some type of bootable CD (Like a Linux Live disk...) and backing everything up. (nearly no knowlege of linux is needed if you're backing up to a USB device... eg. an external harddrive)

... unless you had the drives in RAID or something? and he didn't set that back up? gah, too many possibilities.

 

Hi ya thanks so much for the reply.

The drives I have are

Dual drive config - Non Raid - 120GB 60GB X 2 7200 RPM ATA100 HITACHI

weather that means anything to you or not I dont know.

He is certainly not installing windows again I think he meant actually when comp loads there is no info off hard drives there. Or is that even possilbe?

He has had the comp 6 weeks now and really doing my head in.

Can you tell me how hard it would be to transport everything from the two drives onto my western digitial external harddrives and what I would need to do to get the info of them. I take it put them into another computer?

Thanks

 

yeah, putting them into another computer (desktop probably). they should get recognized as additional drives, and then you can transfer your files over USB or firewire or whatever.

 

Thats great, at least thats an option. I will let you know the outcome. thanks very much. Guess the m17 will have to wait until the m7700 breaks again haha.

 

Thats easy.

The Clevo D900T (aka. Alienware m7700) uses AHCI for its SATA drives.

You must have a slipstream version of XP [with the D900T Sata drivers] in order to let the Windows setup to recognize the drives.
- or alternatively, you can put the SATA drivers onto a USB floppy drive(that should have came with the system) and hit F6 when it says "press F6 if you need to install a third party...."

I went over this a number of times on this forum.

And if your HDD were in RAID, its the same thing, but you have to enable the RAID in the BIOS, make sure to set the array to the way it was (if you have data on the drives), and have the SATA RAID drivers ready on a floppy or slipstreamed onto a XP CD.

................

If you are using Vista, its even easier, since Vista does not require a floppy, you can just put the drivers onto a USB drive.