very frustrating.  keeps freezing before i can hit F2 for bios or F12 for boot options.  always freezes at the sam epoint on that little timeline at the bottom of the screen.  when this first happened (a couple months back) i'd turn it off, wait a minute and it'd be fine.  now, it takes 10-20 times before it gets all the way through.

Does it happen with ONLY the mouse, keyboard, and monitor attached to the back ports?

you are reallly good, tesla.  you came up with angles the 'pros' at alienware didn't even think about.  thank you!

you are reallly good, tesla.  you came up with angles the 'pros' at alienware didn't even think about.  thank you!

You are welcome.

Did you find out what USB device has preventing a normal boot? Do you think the BIOS was trying to boot from a non-bootable device?

hey tesla!

at this point you helped me get around the freezing reboot issue by letting me know i needed to kill ALL power to the system, as it appears the PC was sleeping instead of being off, and that was making my system hang.

here's where i'm at.  all i wanted was to get my computer back to factory new.  i had some issues in the beginning that required the computer to be sent out for repair.  best buy returned the computer without the discs!  i didn't realize this until waaay too late.

i just got a new OS disc from dell, but when i try to re-install windows, it gets me to the point where i could reformat the drive.  it's actually two 500gig drives using RAID 0 to make a 1 TB drive.

when i pick Disk 0 Partition 1 (shows the type as primary) and click 'next', the error message is, "setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. see the setup log for more info."

i called alienware CS, and they told me i have to adjust something in the BIOS, but since i was out of warranty by a couple of months, they'd charge me $60-$90 to tell me how to get this done.  

at this point, i'm hoping to circumvent the management climb to get my computer back up and running.  i see there's an option to load drivers, but i'm not sure where to find the drivers IF they even exist on the install disc.  do you have any more tips?

I don't try to help people run/setup RAID on AW desktops because I don't use it or really believe in it now that SSDs are available. I do know that there is a whole section in the Owners Manual that explains it. Also, you can set it up in the BIOS completely (outside of the OS before you install the OS) ... that's how Intel raid always works.

After you get the RAID setup, or just turn in off and use the drives as normal C: and D: (my suggestion) ... see this link:

en.community.dell.com/.../19866250.aspx