Alienware Trouble

V

vw-Jeff

New Member
Sorry for the long post but bare with me please.

Well a year after buying my Alienware laptop it died. How convenient, warranty is up and so is the product. Well I took it in somewhere and they got windows back up and running on it. I think the restore disc they had given me was faulty.

Well... Now about a month later my system has died again. It froze up trying to load Internet Explorer. I turned power off and it came back on saying no operating system found. After a while of being pissed and messing around I gave in and decided to reformat and start from scratch again. I bought an adapter and got all my important stuff onto my desktop. This makes me think that the HD isn't bad. Well now when I go to install windows it gets to the "Choose partition" thing. It doesn't show any drives to choose from and when I press the up arrow it crashes to blue screen. I get a windows stop code of 0x0000008e. Looked up this code and says that ram is bad. The ram I have is one factory stick and a 512 of kingston. I ran some windiag program and it came back with no memory flaws or anything. I just want to get this thing up and running so I can sell it and buy a new nice desktop. Any help at all will be greatly appreciated!
 
I just install windows on this drive using my desktop. It still says no operating system found. I'm fairly confident that it just isn't finding the HD. Are cables a common problem on a laptop? I really don't want it to be something major like the mobo....:(
 
If you have acess to another 2.5" drive, or whatever your laptop uses I would try that, but you might be hosed, the same error occured on my desktop and we had to use ann entirely different drive, the first one never to work again.
 
Well I dropped it off at a repair shop today. When I hook up the Laptop HD to my desktop it recognizes it fine and I can move stuff around and everything. I'll find out soon enough though.
 
Thought I'd give a brief update. Guy at the shop has tried a handful of HDDs to no avail. Thinks it is something with the board. He called Alienware and they want $1200 for a new board, and they have to install it which will be $250 more. Go me. Shop guy is going to try to find a way around using the IDE port by running a USB HDD as the primary one. I don't know how this will work but I can hope...
 
Bad thing is I'm only fixing it so I can sell it. Who is going to want to buy a laptop that requires an external HDD?
 
alien

vw-Jeff said:
Bad thing is I'm only fixing it so I can sell it. Who is going to want to buy a laptop that requires an external HDD?
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honestly its reasons like this i dont like alienware as much. all it is is a expnsive pretty case, with decent graphics. warranties should probably be alitle longer maybe 2years. also, your selling it are you sure it eeps its value enough to get much money back?
 
macnoob said:
honestly its reasons like this i dont like alienware as much. all it is is a expnsive pretty case, with decent graphics. warranties should probably be alitle longer maybe 2years. also, your selling it are you sure it eeps its value enough to get much money back?
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Not positive that I will get much out of it. I've seen the same model on ebay for upwards of 2000 I'd be very pleased to get 1500 but would will settle for 1000. A guy at the computer repair shop would buy it if I wanted less. Maybe I'll give in and help the guy out or something. Maybe get some free repairs in return.;)
 
vw-Jeff said:
Not positive that I will get much out of it. I've seen the same model on ebay for upwards of 2000 I'd be very pleased to get 1500 but would will settle for 1000. A guy at the computer repair shop would buy it if I wanted less. Maybe I'll give in and help the guy out or something. Maybe get some free repairs in return.;)
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thats a good plan, but 2000 for alienware used is insane, im surprised people will buy that
 
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