DELL XPS M1330 crashes at Boot after Vista Update
UPDATE: I ended up replacing the original harddisk with a Samsung model of the same size. The original disk though just works perfectly now as a backup medium in an external case.
Just got my new Laptop (the Thinkpad got stolen), a really nice DELL XPS M1330. It looks awesome, has really good performance and is the most leightweight laptop I ever possessed. My first experiences were discouraging as the pre-installed Vista automatically updated itself. So far so good (yes, we like up-to-date systems), unfortunately after reboot a bluescreen kept it from starting. But luckily I found a way around that by changing two small settings in the BIOS. Specifically the way the Harddisk is configured. Changed it from AHCI to ATA mode for SATA. Not sure how this afffects performance, but hey, rather less than 100% from something than 100% of nothing.
Two steps are required to change settings, first disable the cache, second change from AHCI to ATA. Save and happy working again.
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By Janciosz, November 10, 2008 @ 11:36 am
Actually I found a better solution. The problem is indeed the driver for SATA, but only when you restart Vista, when you shut it down completely then it boots OK. Now, the solution is to update SATA driver from DELL http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/format.aspx?c=de&l=de&s=gen&deviceid=16841&libid=41&releaseid=R200174&vercnt=1&formatcnt=0&SystemID=XPS_M1330&servicetag=&os=WLH&osl=EN&catid=-1&impid=-1 and install it with ‘have disk’ method
Then you don’t need changing BIOS settings.
By Bipin, July 31, 2009 @ 9:33 am
Hey Daniel,
I need ur expert opinion on a problem i ve encountered. I ve got a XPS M1330 as well. Had been running fine until sterde when it failed to boot up. Gave a hard disk crash error upon running the diagnostic test. DELL customer care replaced the hard disk and the new one is running fine. But they did not help me take a backup of my old disk. They said it was not covered in my warranty. Also, I have to return the faulty one by 7 days. How do i take a backup of it? Any ideas?
By admin, July 31, 2009 @ 10:24 am
Hi Bipin, first off I’d buy an external enclosure for the disk and put it in there to so if you can access the data on the disk at all. If that doesn’t work under Windows, download and use a Linux Live Distribution such as Ubuntu. Ubuntu Users are usually very helpful as well in the forums and might have some tips on what to do or what tools to use if that doesn’t work either. But usually I had better results with Linux accessing a faulty disk than with Windows. If you can access the data, just copy over to your internal disk or backup onto DVDs etc. And once you’ve send the disk back, buy another one for the enclosure to run backups against it.
Good luck recovering your data. Keep us posted about the results and the way you chose to do it.
Daniel