m17x Boots To a Blinking Cursor

I have a new m17x and it boots to a blinking cursor on booting and restarting the computer. I have to ctrl-alt-del at the blinking cursor to successfully boot to Win 7. I have been told this is a widespread issue and has to do with the bios not finding the raid 0 boot block on initial boots and restarts from Windows. Is there a fix for this or will there be one in the next bios update? One of the users here said to hit enter in the bios on the raid stripe in the boot order section. That worked once, but then on restart I had the same issue.

Thanks.

 

Does your bios reset the raid settings every reboot?

 

No, they stay the same. Any changes in the bios or raid setup are saved.

 

I always thought ctl-alt-delete was a windows command, not a DOS one.

This would mean that windows is starting, but the boot sector may be screwy. Try reinstalling?

 

ctrl-alt-del is a dos based or post based computer reboot. In windows it will not function as a reboot. The laptop also has a new clean install of win 7 ultimate and came with win 7 home premium. The issue occurs on both. I do not believe it has anything to do with windows as it happens before windows actually boots up. It has something to do with the bios not initially detecting the raid strip.

 

Hmm well there's my theory out the window.

Try reflashing the BIOS? Maybe you have a bad flash causing the RAID controller to act funky.

 

Does this happen every time, most of the time, or just some of the time?

I had this problem intermittently on my old Aurora m7700a which was running RAID 0. It happened infrequently enough that I never really bothered trying to fix it. I must say the first time or two that it happened, I about had a cow. Sometimes it would happen 3 or 4 times in a row, but then it'd go for weeks without acting up at all.

 

If this ever happens to my M17x I'll crap myself. Even if it's fixed by a reboot. I'm gonna make sure and buy some new pants on the way home after work just in case.

 

Mine boots to the alienhead and then stops

have had blinking cursor a few times as well

also sometimes it says over clockfailed when at stock

Explosivpotatoe you better get yourself some new apple catchers!

 

This happens every time. Other than that, everything works good. It passed all of the extended hardware tests.

 

Same here, have done all the diagnosics and extended memory tests, nothing found. ( this was before catastrophic system failour) see other post

theres something fundimentaly wrong with a system that wont boot!
it kind of falls short of the minimum requirements for a laptop

 

I saw in your post where you said it hung on the alienware head? Mine successfully goes through the entire post and stops short of loading windows. Doing a ctrl-alt-del reboots it and then it successfully loads windows with no issues. Were you using a raid 0 stripe on yours?

 

no raid is not used

does your boot stop the same time as the hybrid graphics card flash on and off.

screen goes black and the flickers on and off?

 

No my screen does not flash on and off. I just get a little blinking cursor up in the left corner in dos mode after the post. Then rebooting allows it to go into windows successfully. I was told that it has to do with the bios not initially seeing the boot block of the raid stripe.

 

Well, I just re-flashed the bios and it is now booting properly. So, hopefully that's the end of it.

 

fingers crossed for you