(Solved) Alienware X51 not shutting down

Hello,

I recently got a X51 from a friend who was just about to throw it away because he bought a new computer;

After reinstalling a brand new OS on it, I noticed a strange behavior when **bleep**ting it down : it doesn't power off.

To try to figure out myself what is going on, I tried using Windows, Ubuntu and even FreeDOS (more on than later)

On windows, after a few seconds of "Shutting down..." the screen goes black and the fans keep spinning.

On Ubuntu, the console show all the processes successfully stopping then the last line says "power down" and nothing. The fans keep spinning.

After a bit of research, I found that it might be a BIOS issue, so I updated it to the A14 BIOS version, and nothing changed.

Rebooting works but takes a fair ammount of time. ie : CTRL-ALT-DEL in BIOS config takes a good 30 seconds before actually rebooting.

I tried to disconnect as many things as possible.

I tried everything I could think of, swapping the PSU, swapping RAM, without GPU, nothing changed.

I've seen that A06 Bios might solve this issue on some forums but i cannot downgrade the BIOS.

The bios update utility doen't work (in my case) on w10 and in FreeDOS, I got a message telling me that downgrading is not allowed even with "/forceit" argument.

 

I hope what I said is clear.

Thanks for any help.

 

 

--EDIT--

For any one that might be interested, I finally fixed this problem.

I just changed the motherboard jumpers positions to reset the BIOS and BIOS password (password probably useless in this case). I pressed the power button for a good 30 seconds. Then placed the jumpers back to their original position. Et Voila :)