I'm facing issues with booting of my out of warranty on 10/11/17 Alienware 17 R3, Nvidia 980M gpu laptop.
The story: I left my laptop on overnight and woke up to see the apps were frozen/ barely responsive.
I decided to reboot it but now, after the initial Alienware logo, I only see a lit black screen. The fans rev up full speed, as is the case during normal booting but I don't see anything on the screen (Call this case 1)
The Caps lock and Num lock indicators are working fine during this black screen.
However, sometimes on boot I get a Blue Screen with the Error code: 0xc000000e. With either "Device missing or inaccessible" or "Operating system file missing or has some errors. File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe (call this case 2)
I ran the ePSA diagnostics and it returns all tests passed, everything is ok. I was advised on the Alienware subreddit by AW_Support to try power drain, but that hasn't helped either.
Essentially the booting process results in case 1 or case 2 (refer above).
It's possible that it's a software problem (Windows or a Driver). I'd grab another SSD and try to reinstall Windows on it and see if you can boot properly. You can use the drive already in your machine but if you have data you want to save then you could lose it. I'd use a spare or go buy a cheap one.
It could also be a hardware issue, CPU or GPU failure.
mattyb3
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Posted February 20th, 2020 18:00
It's possible that it's a software problem (Windows or a Driver). I'd grab another SSD and try to reinstall Windows on it and see if you can boot properly. You can use the drive already in your machine but if you have data you want to save then you could lose it. I'd use a spare or go buy a cheap one.
It could also be a hardware issue, CPU or GPU failure.