Dell XPS M1330, the story doesn’t end
My Dell XPS M1330 finally arrived yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised that it showed up after some confusion over its DHL tracking status.
As I have posted about previously, the first thing I always do when getting a new computer is to install a fresh copy of Windows without all the “crap” software installed. In this case, I also wanted to change the version of Windows from Vista Home Premium to Vista Ultimate basically for the benefit of the BitLocker feature.
Here’s the problem. You knew it was coming. When loading a non-OEM version of Vista that has not been modified by Dell to include the correct drivers the installation will fail with a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Then when booting into safe mode to troubleshoot the problem the system hangs while trying to load the crcdisk.sys driver. It turns out that “safe mode with command prompt” will not even allow the system to boot.
So, I opened up a chat session with Dell support. After describing the problem Dell’s official response is “that the warranty does not cover installing a non OEM operating system (which means we only support installing the OS that came with the computer).” Dell Customer Care and I agreed that the problem most likely is with the SATA drivers. An option is to try to load the updated SATA drivers during the installation process. The only problem is there is a list of 10 or so SATA controllers contained in the driver that can be downloaded from Dell.com. My first attempt at trying a random controller from the list didn’t work. Dell could not confirm which SATA controller is in the XPS M1330. I requested that Dell Customer Care find the answer to this problem and they agreed to get back to me via email.
In the mean time I re-installed the OEM version of Vista Home Premium and got my laptop back up and running.
Updated 8/28/07 – Dell Customer Care has still not responded via email with the information on the SATA controller drivers that they agreed to follow up on.
Updated 1/13/08 – I’m still running Vista Home Premium that came with the laptop. I haven’t had any problems with it and have been afraid to try to get Vista Ultimate installed because I don’t know how many times the OEM version of Vista Home Premium that came with the system will activate. I’m satisfied to leave it as is for now.
Hey
Shucks! Your story is more harrowing than mine! Thankfully you have found a temporary fix!
Ankur
August 9, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Hi! As soon as they get back to you, could you post here (or send me an email) which SATA driver we are supposed to use? I’m trying to install x64 on my m1330 and I don’t know which driver to use. Thanks!
Mark
August 9, 2007 at 9:39 pm
bleargh !
I do hope that this cheap “marketing” policy will soon become a MAJOR problem for those vendors that “promotes” these crazy commercial proposals from M$ …
Good Luck with the notebook, btw
kOoLiNuS
August 15, 2007 at 2:19 am
I found the driver in the “Drivers and Utilities” CD that came with the laptop (PN: YN362 Rev A00 June 2007). I copy the content of the directory C:\I386\R154200 Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager to an USB flash Drive and load it during Vista installation.
Rico
September 2, 2007 at 7:16 am
The problem is hot-restarting vista…whatever kind of sense that makes. I’ve been in the IT field for 10 years and have never seen anything remotely like this. Fresh install of Vista volume licensed (non-oem) and the install goes flawlessly, but on first boot…it blows up. I tried to get into safe mode and I get BSOD. Try last known, BSOD. Nothing works…until I found another site that says to turn off the PC and let it sit for a second, then cold start it.
I do this and Vista loads fine. Then load the drivers off of the Dell Resource CD.
KRF
September 13, 2007 at 1:56 pm
PS: here’s a good writeup on it—look toward the bottom:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=157838
KRF
September 13, 2007 at 2:01 pm
NOTE: On some systems, at one point the system may not reboot properly and you will get whats called a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Dont panic and dont try and read the bsod..its too quick in the reboot.
The reason for this is because your particular hard drive requires a driver. I have been successful in fixing the problem in two ways:
1. Dont hot restart. Turn it off for a few seconds and then reboot. It should go back to normal then and when you reinstall your drivers, you will reinstall a driver called the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. It is on your M1330 drivers disk and numbered R154198.
2. You can also reboot from the windows disk and click on repair when it gets to that point. It will come to a point where it gives you the option to install specific drivers. You would then insert the drivers disk and look specifically for the above driver.
And remember…dont panic…nothings broken
KRF
September 13, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Thanks guys this really helped i have been banging my head against a wall over this. I notice if you turn it off completely after the end of the windows install the Dell splash screen takes much longer to clear, i assume while it fafs about with SATA drivers, but it doesnt do it if you just reboot.
JoeBickley
November 7, 2007 at 5:48 am
thanks a lot dudes, ur comeents & blog was of great help to me & a friend of mine
we have exactly t same issue & never thought of t SATA driver, i even took it appart booting without certain components but of course issue persisted
well, thanks again
willow
December 12, 2007 at 7:07 am
The XPS M1330 dosen’t have a TPM module required for the BitLocker feature of Vista!!! Even if you do install Ultimate, you won’t be able to use BitLocker. I do like the feature that lets you put video backrounds. I have Home Premium on my XPS M1330. Ultimate wasn’t worth the extra money.
Mark H
January 13, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Saviour!! I was just about to re-install home basic until I read this… A simple cold boot fixed the issue for me as well.
Thank you.
William
January 18, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Cheers for this fix lads, I’ve just spent a day and a half reinstalling Vista 4 times before I came across this. The issue only started occurring after running Windows updates (53 of them) and I wasn’t looking forward to installing each one, one at a time…
You’ve saved me an awful lot of time and grief by coming across that fix for this ridiculously, poxy bug.
Finbarr
February 22, 2008 at 3:49 am
this restart BSOD got me too. once I had to re-install everything. The solution was to do a cold boot and all is well. This is weird. I did a network car upgrade and was asked to re-start. When it restarted, gave an error that the system did not shutdown properly. After that BSOD. Neways, cold boot solves it atleast.
LeYo
March 30, 2008 at 5:55 am
usualy, when u try to install a SATA controller, when the list appears there is one selected in the list …
that one is the one that windows finds to be “the most compatible”
rafy
April 4, 2008 at 5:26 am
You guys rock! Did IT work in the AF for 20 yrs and this had me stumped. Shut it down for 30 seconds and ran fine afterwards. Should have searched earlier!! 8o)
Thanks again!
Jeff
Jeff
May 10, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Okay Brainiacts, Ready for another one? I hope so, I running the XPS One Product Red, seems out of the blue it decideds to hang at shut down. All else seems okay, other then the typical Vista won’t accept outside drivers ie: DRM crapolla. I suspect this is the future and work arounds would be greatly appreciated, can’t use my soundtap on the new (vista Ultimate) systems, have to pull out the whole diehard XP for stream recordings. Anyway, what’s up with the shutdown hangs. PLEASE !!! HELP!!!! Thanks
Gib
May 17, 2008 at 11:58 am
and another one….
I’m really hoping someone can help out with this.
I installed XP on my M1330 by disabling sata in the BIOS. After install I read a guide on the net (which i can’t find now!) to tweak a driver setting by a digit or two. I did it!
Rebooted and enabled Sata – everything fine.
Problem is every few days – just randomly I get a nice BLUE SCREEN with the following error.
STOP: 0×000000F4 (0×00000003, 0×89B06908, 0×89B06A7C, 0×805D13B6)
Can anyone shed any light on how to stop this happening?
Pav
May 23, 2008 at 9:30 am
I got a Dell xps 1330 just a week ago and i’m struggling with the instalation of SP1 ever since. When I run the SP1 exe, after 20 secs I get the same internal error message. I tried everything – updating all drivers, disc scan/check, calling MS support center 10 times and still nothing..
Any suggestions?
Jerr
June 5, 2008 at 10:36 am
I’ve been having a video problem on my XPS M1330 for the last couple weeks. I’m in the process now of working on the issue with Dell support. We’ve replaced the motherboard, heat sink, processor, memory and hand rest. A new LED screen should be here tomorrow to try. So far the video issue has not been resolved, but is not a result of OS or drivers. I completely re-installed the OS from Microsoft media. The version that I installed was Vista with SP1 and it worked just fine.
I’ve never tried to upgrade Vista to SP1 on the Dell OEM install of Vista. If you have access to the media and would want a fresh installation I would go that route.
Drew
June 5, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I’m the head of IT at a hospital and have this collegue (a doctor) at work with personal Dell XPS M1330 laptop.
QUICK SPECS:
Intel Centrino Duo 1.8Ghz
1GB RAM
MS Windows Vista Home Premium
It has been solid since late 2007 but about two months ago, he complains that
1. The CD/DVDROM doesn’t work
2. Sometimes the display gets vertical lines in it and
3. The display turns completely white at random.
He says there wasn’t any OS media when he purchased it, just a
Dell DRIVERS AND UTILITIES CD
P/NXF025 Rev.A00
So far I have
1. Booted to safe mode to look at Event viewer where I found several errors from the internal CD drive. I then took the laptop apart and removed the drive and disabled it in BIOS, which seemed to sort out the issue for the next 3 or so boot ups before the lines and white screen symptoms started showing up again.
Probably another 40-50 (over a period of 3 or so weeks) more attempts at a re-boot and
2. Booted as usual and installed
-THE LATEST VERSION OF BIOS (A12 JULY 2008)
-THE LATEST VERSION OF THE NVIDIA 8400 GRAPHICS CARD DRIVER (Ver JULY 2008)
-THE LATEST VERSION OF THE DELL DIAGNOSTICS TOOLS
Which again seemed to sort out the issue for another 5 or 6 shutdowns and boot ups before the Gremlins were back.
I was beginning to wish I had the Vista DVD when I noticed with the volume turned on that even when the white screen appears, the usual Vista sounds are audible
3. I also disabled the Flash Cache in BIOS but stopped short of turning off AHCI (seen somewhere that this causes problems with some issues when it warned me that I may have to re-install the OS (REMEMBERING THAT I HAVE NO VISTA CDS AND DRIVE DOESN’T WORK)
(1. SOUND IT MAKES IN BOOTING LEADING UP TO THE USER ACCOUNT LOG IN SCREEN &
2. THE OTHER MUSIC THAT PLAYS ON A SUCCESSFUL LOGIN WHEN YOU TYPE THE PASSWORD)
This seems to exonerate the software (BIOS, DRIVERS AND OS) and I suspect it is now the monitor, the cable connecting it to the graphics card or the graphics card itself.
I’m wondering if anyone else knows/has had this kind of issue with a Dell XPS M1330 and if so,
what are the possible causes especially if it is hardware related.
And if there is something I’m missing, please let me know,
THANKS
kafulu
August 13, 2008 at 11:32 am
Just an addition, I upgraded the Nvidia drivers after noticing that the system kept giving me an error about the graphics driver saying
“Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding, but has succesfully recovered”
Once upgrade was completed, this stopped popping up (when it allowed me to see what I was logging onto offcourse)
.
kafulu
August 13, 2008 at 11:49 am
Kafalu, its a warranty issue, i sent mine in for a new mobo cuz that was the only way to replace the defective 8400 video card.
Trying today to get it back up and running, my hard drive broke a few days outside of warranty….
those lines and white screens were maddening, this is unacceptable for a dell product, it is my second XPS, i still use my old M170 rig for most of my work.
Perry
August 28, 2008 at 4:09 am
Anyone knows how to prevent my M1330 from defective video card? I’m not going to play any games on it. Does watching movies affect this laptop?
Thanks for your valuable comments.
SoVS
September 26, 2008 at 9:33 pm
I too have had a similar problem. Up until about 6 months ago everything was great. Since then, when the computer does decide to boot it often will “freeze up” after a short while. The screen color will continually fade to one solid blue screen where nothing works. Not even a power down. I have had to remove the battery in order to get the system to shut off. There have been many instances where I can not get past this blue screen from the start. I do not have any of the original software. If anyone can help it will be greatly appreciated!! Thanks for your time!!
Chad Fields
November 29, 2008 at 3:23 pm
As soon as I received the laptop I wiped the hard disk and installed linux. All the hardware just works excluding the webcam and bluetooth (which I haven’t attempted to set up)
Adam
January 9, 2009 at 5:07 am
I had problems with my M1330 locking up upon startup every couple of days. Dell, stating a Vista problem, suggested that I re-install Vista. After installing Vista & using the Drivers /Resource CD, I still get error messages that the network adapter is not installed? I get error messages for other missing drivers and am confused as to why Dell doesn’t include the ones you need on the cd. I’m new at this so any help would be appreciated.
millie
January 21, 2009 at 8:52 am
The quickest and simplest solution to fix the SATA driver Windows install problem is go into the BIOS(F12) and change the Hard Drive into non-SATA compatibility mode. Bam, windows uses the default driver.
Note that when, not if, you have to get your motherboard changed out because you nVidia card burns up, you must re-edit this setting or windows will instantly bluescreen.
EugeneKay
January 21, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Well I’ll be darned. It worked
I popped in windows vista ultimate,
disabled flash cache in bios, changed from AHCI to ATA
saved and exited, it took me into a repair wizard
Everythings back to normal thanks.
Jon
March 13, 2009 at 10:17 pm