Anotherone Bites the dust, Raid Catastrophe

Well something very wierd happened to my 7700 last night... It had shut off yesterday by itself and I had thought it was odd.... Then Last night I rebooted and it never went back to Windows. I noticed when booting up there was no Fast Track bios prompt therefore no HDD were detected. I could boot up fine from a USB Drive, CD or Floppy. No Fasttrak = Death of machine ultimately.

I reflashed the bios a dozen times with 3 different versions and no go, Pulled the power from the wall, battery and CMOS battery and let it sit for a couple hours and still nothing. I read in the Sager forums that a few people have had this problem and it ended up being the Raid Chip on the board is fried.

Then the straw that broke the camels back I decided to try a Sager version of the bios and it failed right smack in the middle of the update. I guess after 12 previous successful flashes it pooped out. Now the lights are on but nobody's home as I like to call it.

So now I'm on the phone with Eurocom to have them overnight ship me a motherboard since this machine is well out of warranty (not originally purchased by me so I didn't have a choice) and I can get one from them for less than a video card for the machine. And my laptop will be ressurected once more. The Kicker is I just sold my second machine that coincidently replaced the motherboard in myself just last week. (I repair laptops can you tell LOL)

Just glad I have my 3200 for backup purposes just like these. Oh that and the fact I backup every single night and check the logs in the morning. So if you guys can learn anything out of this I would say Back dat ass up. I've repaired to many laptops that just bite the bullet and now it's safe to say it's happened to me and one day could happen to you.

Disclaimer
***This isn't a b-session nor a slam on Alienware. I love my machine and this in no way their fault. I just have to deal with it and move on.***

It's not a driver issue, there is no Fasttrak Bios on post. Drivers do you no good if the things not even detecting and can't boot off the drives to begin with.

There's no real one reliable source for parts for Alienware, Normally just have to go to the other OEM's of the notebooks and call around till one has the parts I need. For instance I can get lots of older Alienware parts from Pro-Star however they will sell me nothing new.

Just an update, Motherboards are 2 weeks out of stock so I'm frantically calling every other D900T OEM trying to smooze them out of a Motherboard.

Houston we have LIFT OFF!! Found the Motherboard(from the good people at RJTech) about $50 more than I can get it through Eurocom but worth it. And now my Alienware has 1yr warranty (at least on the MB). It will hopefully be here tomorrow by 10am.

The 7700 won't even work without loading the Raid Bios. Even in ATA mode you have to load the drivers for it to work. It's more like the Fasttrak is the IDE controller for the HDD. Hence the reason CD's work but HDD don't, also this is the reason even in ATA mode you have to load drivers to install windows.

Well I got the motherboard and had it installed in under an hour. Everything is up and running fine and even got the latest revision of the motherboard which should have all the bugs worked out from earlier versions.

about $500