Hi @Zirilian  thank you for sharing your troubleshooting. Seems the m17 R2 POST that looks for and checks that hardware is found and working, does not complete. This problem was intermittent and it is occurring more frequently.

When this problem reoccurs and the system is then up and running in local admin account, go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > System Tools > Event Viewer, wait for logs to load and open summary, event type, critical (red text). As the problem has just occurred, the critical event problem should be at the top of this list. Please share an image so that the Dell Community user to user forum can see this start-up problem. Thank you. 

Hi @crimsom,

Thanks very much for your advice. I'd like to clarify: when you say I should follow the steps you mention "when this problem reoccurs and the system is then up and running in local admin account," do you mean after the system has failed to boot once but then has later booted successfully? (It does still start up, every once in a blue moon.) Will the incident still appear in the logs? (For reference, I'm the only user on the computer and have the administrator privileges.)

If you want a quick and easy way to recover the computer it’s going to cost you your data if you don’t care about it.

Just download the media creation tool and install on USB to click F12 boot options to install.

Hi @Zirilian  the local admin account will retain all the Event logs. You can look at and search all the critical event logs. If you know the time and date, look at these critical event logs. As your system is now only booting once in a blue moon, the critical event logs will have many reports of the same problem at the top of the list. 

When the m17 R2 is up and running, you should use this opportunity to copy all important information to an external storage drive. 

Hi @crimsom,

I finally got the computer to start up again and accessed the event logs as you described. However, there are no critical errors listed from today (17 Oct). There was one from 7 Oct indicating that "the system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first." (See the screenshot below.)

7 Oct Critical Error

There are a few regular errors, including one from today stating that Session "Microsoft.Windows.Remediation" failed to start with the error code 0xC0000035. Please see screenshots of both the general and detailed descriptions below.

17 Oct Error - General17 Oct Error - Details

The only error that appears to have occurred frequently is one under the system log stating that "the XTUOCDriverService service failed to start" because the system could not find the file. (Screenshot below.)

XTUOC Error

Do any of these seem meaningful? I agree there seems to be some kind of POST failure going on, but I'm not quite sure how to evaluate it. Some of the troubleshooting pages suggest there should be colored lights or maybe a series of beeps involved, but all my system's light, color, and sound displays are normal during startup. The only thing I did notice was that on occasions when the computer would freeze during startup, it always spent an unusually long time on the "breathing" pattern (where a rainbow of color sweeps across the keyboard) before bringing up the Alienware logo screen and the keyboard turning blue.

Do an ePSA and verify hardware stability. F12 boot options and then let me know. 

Hi @Zirilian  that is an excellent diagnostic share, thank you for investing your time. Agree that it did not reveal the source of this problem. Something is clearly corrupted and Windows Event Viewer is not providing this information.

Please select a time of more than one hour to run check disk. This is a very powerful tool that frequently gets overlooked. In local admin account, go to This PC, right click on the OS (C:) drive, open Properties, Tools and run error checking to check the drive for file system errors. If errors found, follow the prompts and it will automatically fix these errors. Then Restart to save this fix. Please share the result. Thank you. 

Also I'd check using SFC /scannow first then the chk dsk command

Hi @crimsom,

Thanks for your further suggestion. First I ran the ePSA suggested by @Alienware Area-51 ALX 2006 , but it returned no errors. The system then booted successfully and I did the disc scan you recommended. The scan only took less than a minute, and said it had found no errors.

However, after this, I walked away from the computer for a few minutes to do something else and the screen dimmed, as it's set to do. Normally, however, it brightens again when I return (I have the Tobii eye tracking feature that can tell when I'm in front of the computer). This time it didn't. I was able to increase the screen brightness by using the function key, but the brightness level indicator didn't appear on the screen as normal. I tried to go to the search bar on the start menu, but it never came up, and in fact I found that none of my applications would open successfully. I even tried alt-ctrl-del, but nothing happened. I eventually had to hard shut down the PC, and haven't had a successful boot since then. Unfortunately, this means I haven't been able to run the scannow or chkdsk functions.