Disabled optimus on AW17 r1 - now it won't boot?

[ThisIsBrutus]

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Hello everyone,

Im having a bit of a problem.

TL;DR - Pressed fn+f5 to switch Optimus settings and now windows 8 crashes right after boot-up.

___________________

Im going home to visit some family this weekend and decided to bring my AW17 r1 along for some movie watching in the train.

I boot it up in the train, turn off the lights and press fn+f5 to reboot without the dGPU to extend the battery life.

And this is where it gets problematic.

It will boot into Windows fine, but after a couple of seconds it gets to a start up-process which apparently after the Optimus-switch makes the PC crash.. Mouse and keyboard input stops working although it does kinda look like it's doing something and hasn't crashed completely, but I can't access it.

The biggest problem is that the freezing occurs before I get a chance to press fn+f5 again, and I'm now stuck in a loop where I can't boot up.

I might add that I'm running it pretty heavily overclocked with modified driver and vbios.

I can get it to boot up in safe mode just fine and I have tried fiddling with power settings since I figured that might be the problem, it still doesn't work when I tried to boot up normally, and since the fn+ shortcuts aren't available in safe mode it doesn't really help me much, and I can't find anywhere in the OS(or BIOS) where I can turn off Optimus.

I hope anyone is able to help or this is gonna be a loooong train ride.

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[timduke985]

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Hello everyone,

Im having a bit of a problem.

TL;DR - Pressed fn+f5 to switch Optimus settings and now windows 8 crashes right after boot-up.

___________________

Im going home to visit some family this weekend and decided to bring my AW17 r1 along for some movie watching in the train.

I boot it up in the train, turn off the lights and press fn+f5 to reboot without the dGPU to extend the battery life.

And this is where it gets problematic.

It will boot into Windows fine, but after a couple of seconds it gets to a start up-process which apparently after the Optimus-switch makes the PC crash.. Mouse and keyboard input stops working although it does kinda look like it's doing something and hasn't crashed completely, but I can't access it.

The biggest problem is that the freezing occurs before I get a chance to press fn+f5 again, and I'm now stuck in a loop where I can't boot up.

I might add that I'm running it pretty heavily overclocked with modified driver and vbios.

I can get it to boot up in safe mode just fine and I have tried fiddling with power settings since I figured that might be the problem, it still doesn't work when I tried to boot up normally, and since the fn+ shortcuts aren't available in safe mode it doesn't really help me much, and I can't find anywhere in the OS(or BIOS) where I can turn off Optimus.

I hope anyone is able to help or this is gonna be a loooong train ride.

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I had the exact same problem with my Alienware 17 r1 with 980m and modified driver/vbios. Graphics switching only works with Windows 8 or 8.1 in uefi mode. To get it to boot I had to remove the 980m and start it like that. Then reinstalled Win 8.1 uefi.