As the title says, I'm running a Alienware M5700 series laptop. I'm trying to format my HD but I'm running into a problem where the laptop doesn't detect my cd drive. It doesn't stop there. I can't even get into safe mode to try and update my drivers or try to do anything due to my graphics are out of wack. If I don't get a jumbled screen with random letters (characters) everywhere, then I get a blue or a black screen. I'm clueless on what to do at this point. The few times I can get into cmd prompt, I try to format c: but then comes in the volume dismounting problem which makes sense that you can't lock/dismount a drive when you're using it.
does the bios see the rom drive? are you using a recovery disk or recovery partition to reload windows?
The bios does recognize the cd drive and I'm using a windows cd as the boot disk. I've tried 'boot from cd' and obviously nothing.
Yuck.. alienware screwed up bios. What you need to do is search what the motherboard really is (I will guess a Toshiba satellite series.. niot exactly high end) and hunt out the manufacturers "real" bios and reflash.. What you need failing the capabilities to do that is.. a usb floppy drive or another laptop you can fit the hdd into. I refuse these when people bring them.. too much trouble and annoyance. I have fixed these by making a strange xp image.. a set of installed generic system drivers on an image partition using a very similar laptop.. then using puppy linux copying the set over across the network as a block and making the new partition bootable. Takes days to get it to work as intended. My usual advice with ALL alienware junk these days is take it back where you bought it and pay them to fix it... or find a stockist if it was bought online..
Is that a dell beastie then? Still haven't bothered to google the model specs. In my experience alienware junk had denuded bios with most of the important settings and functions removed.
Why I don't like dell these days? .. what is a "service tag"?? found this which is interesting.. cnet just says "discontinued" http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=351500 went my usual route with alienware and hunted down what this dressed up machine actually is.. not far off with toshiba.. Bet that has a proper bios.... warning.. 2 different versions of this thing exist .. happen to know which version yours was before it went screwy?
I have no clue on any of it's specs. It was a laptop my friend basically handed over to me so I could game with him. I had it for 3 days before it went screwy. I've had a busy work week and have slacked off on researching the specs myself.
