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Help Please!!!

post #1 of 17
12/7/12 at 12:58pm
Thread Starter 
I recently bought my son an Alienware m7700 laptop as a Christmas present. What the guy didn't tell me was that the HDs were shot. I spoke with a tech from my work and he told me I could switch it from raid to ata easily and just use 1 harddrive instead of 2...

So I went into the bios and changed it... now when I start the laptop I get nothing but a black screen. I took out the battery and the cmos battery and held the on button for 15 seconds. I theh put it all back and still nothing. I was told doing this would reset the bios... it didn't..

What can I do? I have to have this fixed by Christmas.

Thanks in advance,
Larry
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post #2 of 17
12/7/12 at 9:31pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Numanchi View Post

I recently bought my son an Alienware m7700 laptop as a Christmas present. What the guy didn't tell me was that the HDs were shot. I spoke with a tech from my work and he told me I could switch it from raid to ata easily and just use 1 harddrive instead of 2...
So I went into the bios and changed it... now when I start the laptop I get nothing but a black screen. I took out the battery and the cmos battery and held the on button for 15 seconds. I theh put it all back and still nothing. I was told doing this would reset the bios... it didn't..
What can I do? I have to have this fixed by Christmas.
Thanks in advance,
Larry

do you feel that the notebook is running but only with black screen?

cheers ...
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post #3 of 17
12/8/12 at 3:37am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by qhn View Post

do you feel that the notebook is running but only with black screen?
cheers ...

Yes. The fans come on.
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post #4 of 17
12/8/12 at 12:02pm
I would first verify that the system would start with the Raid reactivated in the BIOS. Can you share with what type of error you had when 1st turning it on when you received it, before fiddling around with the BIOS entries?

cheers ...
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post #5 of 17
12/8/12 at 2:26pm
Thread Starter 
"No operating system found"

That's all it said prior to me messing with it.
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post #6 of 17
12/8/12 at 7:00pm
Can you put the BIOS settings back to they were, and then try using an installation disk and see if the system can start and recognizes the OS from the disk?

cheers ...
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post #7 of 17
12/9/12 at 5:18am
Thread Starter 
.
Quote:
Originally Posted by qhn View Post

Can you put the BIOS settings back to they were, and then try using an installation disk and see if the system can start and recognizes the OS from the disk?
cheers ...

That's the problem. The screen won't turn on now that I changed the bios... as in.. I see absolutely nothing. :'(
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post #8 of 17
12/9/12 at 8:09am
What about hooking up with an external monitor and see if any differences?

cheers ...
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post #9 of 17
12/9/12 at 10:28am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by qhn View Post

What about hooking up with an external monitor and see if any differences?
cheers ...

I'll give that a try and notify you of my findings.

Thank you.
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post #10 of 17
12/10/12 at 3:51am
Thread Starter 
No difference.
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post #11 of 17
12/10/12 at 9:39am
I don't believe that the BIOS fiddling would have hurt anything, it was just a coincidence - my take is that teh motherboard and/or the GPU is failing

cheers ...
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post #12 of 17
12/10/12 at 10:22am
Thread Starter 
What about the cmos battery itself? If it were dead, would it cause this?
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post #13 of 17
12/10/12 at 7:15pm
Not necessarily, and I take it that you tried starting the comp with the power adapter as well.

cheers ...
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post #14 of 17
12/11/12 at 10:25am
Thread Starter 
This is what I did.. took out the main battery..... waited 1 minute. Held the power button for 10 seconds... removed the cmos battery, removed the ram and then removed the video card.. in that order. I then reassembled everything in anocomposure order. I'm now bAck to where I originally started.
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post #15 of 17
12/11/12 at 10:29am
Back to "No operating system found"? So now try with an installation CD/DVD and see if you can boot it up from there

cheers ...
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post #16 of 17
12/12/12 at 10:21am
Thread Starter 
No luck. Also, when I go to bios I don't see my cdrom.
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post #17 of 17
12/12/12 at 11:45am
That's not a good sign. sad.gif

cheers ...
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