m17x blue screen...crashes

i just got my alienware! literally i just got it today. i turned it on it booted up fine. i ran through the vista installation fine. when i tried to update the windows it got halfway and i got a blue screen i restarted it and it continued the installation and it went fine. i tried to install street fighter 4 it crashed on me. tried it a second time and vista froze on me. tried it a third time and again vista froze on me. now i cant even boot into windows and i keep getting a blue screen. first i get the bios screen than it starts booting up and all of a sudden blue screen! its driving me nuts! its upsetting because i just got it today! please help me if anyone can! it would be greatly appreciated!

 

Hi

Im a noob myselfe but do u bougth with your alienware a alienrespawn dvd? If yes try to launch it and sett everything into Factory settings, maybe it will help it.

 

i didnt get the respawn dvd! i knew i shoulda got it!

 

boot into safe mode and uninstall your gpu drivers and see if that fixed it. If so then install 186.82 I believe is the newest one with hybrid Ali support.

 

@toysoldier: You should have a hidden Alienrespawn partition someplace that you can boot from. Try a fresh respawn and see if that fixes the issues. Ususally in the boot sequence right after the alien head, push F10.(if it is a new gen M17x at least)

 

@ zackb: i'll try doing that tonight i can;t right now because i'm stuck in class! arrgghhh! i'm dying to mess around with it and hopefully get it working

 

ok...i tried the whole f10 thing and all i keep getting is a black screen that sez missing os...i tried to use the vista installation disk that the computer came with and when i get the the part of the installation where it asks "where do you want to install windows" i can only see one of my harddrives , i have 2 500gb in raid 0, but thats not the problem i select the 500gb harddrive and it sez "windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation" i just don't understand what i'm doing wrong!

 

btw just thought i'd mention when i ran the diagnostics it had said something about my harddrive not passing.

 

Call Dell Support and have them deal with this issue. We can try different fixes all day but if there is an issue with hardware being faulty its best to have them deal with it now. They will send out replacement HDDs and you'll send yours back. Try to backup all of your personal files ASAP to an external drive.

As an alternative, you can also tell them you want a replacement unit sent as long as you are still in your 30 day period from invoice date. They can build and ship a new one and once it arrives, you'll send your current system back.

Discuss both options with Support.

 

thanx alot i guess your right. no use with trying to go over different fixes when it could just be faulty hardware! i'm gonna call dell tomorrow and go over my options.thanks to everyone for their time and help! really appreciate it!

 

I bet you have a hard drive failure. I just got my m17x about a month ago and I started having the same kind of trouble you describe and that is random whatever when you boot up. Meaning anything from the BSODs to the wallpaper loads and the hard drive light runs solid and machine is locked up.

I booted from the resource disk and ran the hard drive diag and it failed every test immediately. I called Dell support and went through the usual troubleshooting script and although the gentlemen was very difficult to understand and communicate with, after about 30 minutes of trying to convince him that the computer would not boot, he spoke to his supervisor and a hard drive replacement was authorized. It was late in the evening when I called so the day after the next (technically next business day) a Unisys guy showed up at my house with the new drive. He had never seen an m17x before so that did not inspire a lot of confidence but the hard drives are not really difficult to replace so we got through it in about 10 minutes and I immediately booted off the diag disk again and the hard drive tests all passed.

After having gone through this after only 30 days out, I started Googling around and saw a fair amount of folks complaining about the Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM 500 GB drives failing after only a few days to few weeks. I'm wondering if there was a bad batch of them or something or they are just junk drives to begin with. The replacement drive that they sent was a full version number higher on the firmware.

It's very sickening to have a failure like this after spending $$$$ on a PC like the m17x but I guess you can get a bad hard drive in anything.

The best thing I can say from my whole experience is that once I got Vista all tricked out and all my apps and games installed, I purchased the ABS Plus from CMS products and had about a 3 days prior complete Bounce Back backup of my drive. So after my hard drive replacement, I booted off my USB backup drive and in literally the time it takes to copy 140 GB over a USB 2.0 connection, I was back up and running (about 2 hours).