M7700 Freeze

First thing first; Specs.

AREA-51M 7700i
P4 3.4GHZ 650 2MB 800FSB LGA775 TRAY
4x PDP 512MB DDR2 PC4200 SO-DIMM AW78
2x SAMSUNG 60GB 5400RPM PATA
7700 NVIDIA G71MUU 7950 GTX WITH 512MB
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Now the problem. It started off one night when the laptop just froze, I restarted the laptop, and am welcomed by the all too familier screen of "Operating System Not Found". So after letting it sit around for a bit I try to start it back up, it boots fine, finds the IDE drives, boots up and I now scramble to hit ctrl alt delete to see whats going on in the computer, and I find nothing going in task manager but idle processes at about 90% cpu.

It freezes again. So this time I try and rule out spyware that the kids could of downloaded and use the respawn, go through that whole process, during the process it would say it couldnt find the hard drives, after a few reboots or letting it sit for a while it would find them, Installed fine. Tried launching it again same thing, freeze on start. So this time I tried to reformat the drives.

When I started trying to reformat the drives I pulled the drivers for the raid controller off alienwares site, went thru the process of installing windows, chose the drive to install it on, reformat froze the three times I attempted it. once at 9% once at 18% and the third time at 5%.

What i've attempted:

1) Removed a hard drive, tried to install on the single hard drive with non-raid drivers, never found the hard drive in windows install but showed on boot.

2) Switched master and slave Hard drive and reinstalled. Trouble finding hard drives at time but found them once in a while.

3) Eventually I left it alone for a while and it started back up, windows started and it froze again on start. It stays working for about 30Seconds or so before it freezes again.

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Any suggestions?

 

What a bad problem...

Do your laptop seems to have fan controling problems? I mean, when it freezes, does it turn off and finishes by a "full-speed fan period" (about 10 seconds of cooling after the laptop is off).
Also, has any one of the fans stopped working since you're having this problem?

Is yes, it would be a very bad problem for you, because you'll need to send it for repair (not Alienware, because they stopped repairing this model), like I did with my M7700.

 

Ah, no the fans all seem to work, they all kick in when it freezes and the processor light stays on full time while its frozen, even if I let it sit idle at the black screen with "Operating system not found" after a while the fans go off and on etc.

 

Small update, I called alienware the guy on the phone was kind enough to give me some quick tips as I no longer have a warrenty.

Tip: If the computer is freezing like this and sometimes the hard drives don't come up on restart in the scanning IDE section. It ussually means its the hard drive or memory. That being said I attempted to toss it into ATA mode as he suggested and tryed installing via ghost respawn, in ghost respawn I went ahead and went to:

Local > Check > Disk

In this option I found, as he stated, three possible options. One small one, which isnt used, another (Second option) was one of my hard drives, The Third, another hard drive, was greyed out. So now I'm attempting to open up the computer to determine which drive it was. Installing windows on it if possible after Via the Non-Raid drivers if the Respawn Kit doesn't work. ^.^


Edit: Having some trouble, anytime I disconnect, reconnect, or try to do something on the drives it doesnt detect them right away for some reason. So if i take on out for example, it will not detect the new one i put in, if I switch it to the other it will not detect that one either, but when i plug them both in and wait a while it detects both.. This is puzzleing me.

 

Mmm it seems very complicated. I think your laptop doesn't detect one at time because Raid is always activated. Try to go in the BIOS and desactivate it. Then try again with booting on 1 hard disk, it should detect it...

 

This thread of mine may help you if you are using SATA harddrives:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=347779

The problems you are having may also be related to a short on your chassis.
Once when I reassembled my laptop, I accidentally cut a speaker cable, which shorted on the cpu heatsink, and caused the system to freeze when ever the contacts touched.
You may also try reseating the processor or just plain testing the processor in a desktop. On the AMD's there is a screw to lock the processor in place, On the Intel's I think its just an ordinary LGA775 socket, so make sure the pins are all straight and uniform, and make sure the base of the processor (the part with the shiny brass looking contacts) are clean

If a pin in the socket is bent (on the LGA socket) grab an X-ACTO
get a number 11 blade in it. Use the dull side of the blade to pull up any pins which may not be contacting the processor

This is quite a common problem on numerous boards which use LGA sockets. I know the X-acto trick I came up with has saved me from many headaches when working on my Socket F AMD workstation boards. All it takes is one pin not contacting properly to cause problems.

The Clevo D900T and D900K have a million and a half known problems with them, I wish I knew that before buying mine, I had to learn the hard way, by trying endlessly to solve the recurring problems.

K-TRON