Disk error Replace and strike any key when ready

[optr0nic]

Hi everyone,
I recently just recieved my alienware m17 x r3 from newegg.com.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834200355

opened it up. everything worked great. logged onto dell and downloaded the lastest drivers. including a few firmware updates. i think one of them messed with the mobo, and another mess with the wifi lan, and another mess with either the storage drive, or the recovery partition on the drive, or both.
After a reboot, and everytime since. I get this error on a black screen right after the bios flash screen

"disk error Replace and strike any key when ready"

I hit a key and the system starts normally.

now ive tried looking for solutions online, havnt tried dell.com yet. But the solutions scare me. its a brand new system. and i have a 30 day return policy from newegg.com. theres a diagnostic utility in the recovery partition that i havnt tried yet. but im just throwing this out there to get this thread going. some sites suggest that my MBR is fubared. others suggest the drive is shot. and others suggest that i should RMA.

any ideas on what to try?

 

[optr0nic]

One thing i noticed in the BIOS. the partition is set to RAID. but its only one drive so im not sure how one drive has redundancy. and maybe the o/s is looking for the second drive in the array and cant find it which is why its asking me to hit a key because theres a disk error. just a thought

 

[Hawkeye22]

Normally you don't want to update firmware unless it is going to fix a problem you are currently having. I'm thinking the other firmware update was for the raid controller, not for storage devices. I'd try flashing it with the previous version of firmware. Hopefully it gave you the option to backup the current firmware before over writing it, otherwise you might be able to find it on Dell's support site. Just put in your service tag number and it will find your system and everything it shipped with.

Edit:
I forgot to mention, after updating firmware, you need to go into the bios and load optimized defaults.

 

[optr0nic]

Thank you for your response. I went into the BIOS after i saw the error and loaded default settings. I dont think i saw an optimized option. as far as backing up the old bios i think it does that automatically ( i hope ). if that screen pops up everytime and i hit a key and it starts normally. is it ok to leave it like that instead of flashing the bios again. or is there a problem which will get worse without it being solved?

also want to ask, if i set the partition in the bios to something non-raid ( forget the actually acronym ) will that cause me to loose everything?

 

[Hawkeye22]

I don't think it a problem, especially if everything shows ok in the device manager. You may want to go into the bios and change RAID to AHCI and see if that gets rid of it. Worst case, it won't boot and you can switch the bios back to raid and reboot normally.

 

[optr0nic]

I don't think it a problem, especially if everything shows ok in the device manager. You may want to go into the bios and change RAID to AHCI and see if that gets rid of it. Worst case, it won't boot and you can switch the bios back to raid and reboot normally.

sweet. when i was thinking about trying it. it said i may loose all my data. so i refrained.

 

[optr0nic]

i talked to alienware support. guy was very helpful. walked me through several things and nothing fixed it. he initially wanted to FFR the thing but was ok with me trying stuff and even suggested a few things. at the end of the day i just did the FFR since it was a brand new box. loaded it right out of the partition on the drive. the error went away and i installed only things that i needed. laptop runs like a hot knife through butter now. Also created two DVD backups after installing everything i want. so now im g2g if i ever just want to wipe it and start over. i like this feature as the longer a OS runs the more bloated it gets, and being able to reset it back to where i had it with only things i need right after factory reset. is a good way to keep things running smoothly. also want to add that should i need to do a restore from my recovery disks, it gives me the option of saving all data on the machine and putting it in a file after the restore completes on my desktop. these are little things that other manufacturers that sell "cheaper" less "flashy" machines with the same specs fail.