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I really have trouble determining the cause and consequence of this problem; I have an alienware aurora R4. First, I had a failing hard drive. S.m.a.r.t. data said there were bad sector. I kept using the system for some days after making a backup. The system was crashing at least once per day.
This morning the system crashed another time. The blue screen felt stuck, so I hard reset the system, but the system finally shut down in the middle of the bios(?) loading. Here is a picture showing how it looks like : https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mVMHurua1f4/maxresdefault.jpg
Since then, the bios/boot is very slow, including the beeps. The beeps sounds like they are extended. There is a loud long beep after the bios finished loading. In the menus before OS loads, there is heavy lag when switching between lines. OS take a lot of time to load (even after replacing the hard drive by a working ssd), but loads eventually after a few minutes. I replaced the faulty hdd.
Dell said they should replace the mother board, charging almost $800. I hope there is another alternative. Be it changing bios parameters, do something related to CMOS or the motherboard battery, or something else.
I would like to know :
-what could I do to fix this problem ?
-can I keep using the system with the new SSD without any further damage, could it hide a problem even worse than this one?
-and also what could have caused this ? Seems a lot of things happened just before the problem started happening (the hard drive failing, then me shutting down the PC in the middle of a load).
Thank you.
Update:removed the coin battery and put it back in, it removed the lags in bios option, the other problems remains.
Have you tried removing and reseting individual RAM sticks? Have you an external graphics card that can be removed to see if that is the cause? – Kinnectus – 2016-08-09T19:10:17.893
I tried removing the RAM, putting another stick (only 1), same loud beep at the end of pre-OS loading; removed the graphics card, heard the same noise. Ran the built in diagnostic, found no error. It feels strange that this happened after a hdd crash and after I mistakenly shut down the computer manually. Also strange that the lag disappeared after replacing the coin battery. – Chatai – 2016-08-09T19:18:38.430