colinator

Thanks for your reply. I seem to have an issue with the Msata port and hdd caddy. On the msata drive, windows install stays stuck at 0% and when installing to a different disk and partition the msata in diskmanager will cause a hang. I ordered a samsung evo 850 now as I have a feeling the issue is with the Crucial M550 drive and not the laptop. The m550 works in another machine and I got a kingston msata drive which seemed to work in the alienware. So I will report back later. The HDD caddy still has an issue, (with multiple drives...) The drives are Always detected in both Windows and the BIOS and can even be used however, sometimes at boot windows hangs (hdd led stays constant on). Windows still boots up after a hang of about 3 minutes but the drive is then NOT detected anymore by windows. Powering off and on the laptop fixes the issue (for the moment) This issue also seem to happen when resuming from sleep, machine wakes up but the screen stays black for a long time (hdd led stays constant on) and then suddenly becomes active or in a unique case, suddenly reboots. When removing all other drives and only use the HDD caddy I keep having this issue. When I remove the HDD caddy (disconnect the ribbon cable) the issue is gone. *edit* This is what I can see in the event viewer for the drive in the caddy: The IO operation at logical block address 0x705a28 for Disk 0 (PDO name: \Device\0000003f) was retried.

Hello, My M18X R2 seems to have a weird issue which I am unable to figure out. Sometimes during boot or when resuming the laptop from sleep, I only get a black screen and nothing happens. The HDD activity led remains on constantly. Sometimes it also happens during windows boot but it will continue however after a couple of minutes but every time I run into this issue, the HDD led remain constantly on. Its like the HDD is hanging for some reason. If the machine has booted into windows, it will run fine, the HDD works fine as well. till either a reboot or sleep. After taking apart the laptop several times to troubleshoot, I noticed that this only happens to the drive that is connected in the HDD caddy with the ribbon cable. I still have my SSD in the optical bay connected. As soon as I remove the hdd caddy, the issue disappears (but then I am missing a disk). Windows boots normal (and fast) and sleep goes fine too. If I swap the 2 disks around, the issue remains at the hdd caddy so I basically ruled out the disks. At first I thought its a faulty ribbon cable however, the MSATA port also has an issue.... It detects the MSATA drive correctly but for some reason, installing windows on it fails every time. I can either create a GPT partition but the installer stays stuck at 0% or even the partitioning fails. The drive itself works in another machine. SMART and the Dell diagnostics are not showing any issue so I am a bit lost as to where to look now to resolve the issue. I am running a unlocked bios A11 currently, not sure if reflashing would help or not. Hope someone is able to recognize the issue and can point me in the right direction. Thanks

Hi, I have got a similar problem. I also have the M550 Msata drive but the BIOS is detecting it correctly. However when I use the drive with windows install, partitioning always fails. When I put it into RAID with another SSD, the RAID volume keeps failing due to the Msata drive. RST reports the drive is not in the raid anymore and then suddenly it is (and then again its not). I want to try reflashing the BIOS to see if this helps but I have no clue as to why its not working. The msata drive itself is not faulty as it works fine in another system.

Hello, I have got a M18X R2 with A11 unlocked bios. I seem to be having some issues so I am hoping that by flashing the bios again these will be solved. Can I use A12 stock bios and then flash the A10 unlocked bios? I am currently using a GTX 970m single card, would this cause any issue?