Alienware Area-51 m7700 doesn't always boot

Recently a friend of mine gave me 2 m7700's because they weren't working for him. He told me if I can get them working, I can have them for little or nothing. I can't seem to figure out what is wrong with them. At first, I thought it was a bad video card. I would turn on the computer... the fans would eventually start, but nothing would come up on the screen. I figured at least the bios would come up.. Earlier today I decided to try and start it up again and all of the sudden it actually worked! I accessed the bios and set everything back to the defaults and tried to boot into Windows. It booted up but froze before I could get it to load. I shut down the computer and tried to restart it again right away. It quit working again.. Finally I tried several more times and eventually it started again. It seems every time I actually press the power button to shut it down, it won't start back up again, but if I restart it from Windows it restarts every time. Still kind of confused, I decided I would try installing a fresh copy of Windows and reformatting the hard drive. At the setup screen in Windows XP when you are supposed to say which drive you want to put the OS on, there are no hard drives listed. After it sits at that screen for a little while the screen eventually turns blue and says that windows has shut down do to an error. Any ideas anyone? Thanks in advance....

where can i get the raid drivers from? shouldnt they still be on there from before when the other guy owned the computer?.. sorry i dont know too much when it comes to alienware... so even though it won't recognize the hdd that doesnt mean that it shouldnt boot up every time..correct? im just kind of wondering if i want to put any money into this thing... i was just going to fix it up if i could do it for less then a couple hundred dollars. the weird thing is that he gave me 2 laptops and they are both doing the exact same thing.. well..i assume they are..i havent gotten the one to boot yet. what are the chances?

oh well i guess...im going to see if he wants them back.. if not i think im going to sell them on ebay. i just really don't want to shell out $450 to fix up some laptops that from what i have read, seem to crash/malfunction all of the time. ill just stick with my dell.. its treated me pretty good. thanks for the help guys

i would try the drivers if i could get the computer to turn on... its hard to install anything on a computer that wont do anything.. unless you have a way to put them on there while its powered off...?? im all ears buddy boy.. i was after help...and i appreciated your input... you dont need to get angry. from my point of view i think it seems better to stick with my 9300 that i havent had to put $1 into then shell out a ton of money for a computer that is discontinued and is soon going to be hard to find parts for. what happens when i buy a new mobo...then it craps out on me again, and i cant find another? it sounds like it is a pretty common problem and seeing how both of the alienwares he gave me are doing the exact same thing, id rather not take my chances.. and i didnt literally mean all.. cmon now