Alienware 15 R3 Won't boot to Windows after GPU issue

[DyverTech]

I got my alienware 15r3 with a gtx 1070 about a month ago. Everything was fine and dandy until about a week ago, the screen brightness wouldn't change. I didn't get around to looking into it till last night. I was doing some research and found some others had the same issue when Windows 10 forced the driver update to an Nvidia driver that had an issue with brightness adjustment.

 

The forums I saw said just rollback the driver. I didn't have a driver to rollback to so I went out and found older driver editions under Nvidia's 10 series for notebooks driver sections. Picked one that was two verisons back from the current release and installed it. It seemed to be alright and restarted to finalize the install but to no avail. I still couldn't change the screen brightness. In hindsight I think I should probably have gone through Dell to get the driver but anyway now to the current issue. When I realized the older driver didn't fix the original issue, I decided to reboot once more to make sure it hadn't missed anything.

 

Instead of going back to Windows, it went to a preboot hardware testing screen. It passed it's tests and asked what I wanted to do. I tried to get it to continue booting to Windows, it went dark like it was restarting and then the alienware logo appeared for a few seconds and then the computer did what I'd describe like a hard shut down. Like those shutdowns when you can here the HDD needle click over. I eventually got to the Windows troubleshooting screen and tried to reset the PC. It started the process but on the re installation of Windows, it did that hard shut down again at like 55% and then rebooted to say it had encountered an error and that resetting wouldn't work. I then tried to get into safe mode, but after hitting the advanced option in windows troubleshooting to get the window that gives the option to go to safe mode it would do that hard shutdown and just go back of the beginning options of Windows Troubleshooting. At this point, I plan on attempting to do a clean install of Windows 10 but was wondering if anyone else had run into anything like this? If the clean install doesn't work, I'll probably take it back to the store and return it as I'm still in my return period. 

[NuclearKing]

16 minutes ago, DyverTech said:

I got my alienware 15r3 with a gtx 1070 about a month ago. Everything was fine and dandy until about a week ago, the screen brightness wouldn't change. I didn't get around to looking into it till last night. I was doing some research and found some others had the same issue when Windows 10 forced the driver update to an Nvidia driver that had an issue with brightness adjustment.

 

The forums I saw said just rollback the driver. I didn't have a driver to rollback to so I went out and found older driver editions under Nvidia's 10 series for notebooks driver sections. Picked one that was two verisons back from the current release and installed it. It seemed to be alright and restarted to finalize the install but to no avail. I still couldn't change the screen brightness. In hindsight I think I should probably have gone through Dell to get the driver but anyway now to the current issue. When I realized the older driver didn't fix the original issue, I decided to reboot once more to make sure it hadn't missed anything.

 

Instead of going back to Windows, it went to a preboot hardware testing screen. It passed it's tests and asked what I wanted to do. I tried to get it to continue booting to Windows, it went dark like it was restarting and then the alienware logo appeared for a few seconds and then the computer did what I'd describe like a hard shut down. Like those shutdowns when you can here the HDD needle click over. I eventually got to the Windows troubleshooting screen and tried to reset the PC. It started the process but on the re installation of Windows, it did that hard shut down again at like 55% and then rebooted to say it had encountered an error and that resetting wouldn't work. I then tried to get into safe mode, but after hitting the advanced option in windows troubleshooting to get the window that gives the option to go to safe mode it would do that hard shutdown and just go back of the beginning options of Windows Troubleshooting. At this point, I plan on attempting to do a clean install of Windows 10 but was wondering if anyone else had run into anything like this? If the clean install doesn't work, I'll probably take it back to the store and return it as I'm still in my return period. 

Try a clean install, but take it to the store ASAP if that ends up not working. The harddrive sounds like it hit a snag and might be failing. I've never heard of this sort of issue, so that's my best guess.

[DyverTech]

2 minutes ago, NuclearKing said:

Try a clean install, but take it to the store ASAP if that ends up not working. The harddrive sounds like it hit a snag and might be failing. I've never heard of this sort of issue, so that's my best guess.

I'll return it if it fails the clean install or if I can't get the GPU to behave after reinstalling. It has a solid state for boot and an HDD as secondary storage. I'm guessing that's what's making the noise as my standard HDD Dell at work makes the same noise if you hold the power button down. I really hope nothing is failing in this thing though. I've wanted an Alienware for like 10 years but couldn't justify the cost, so this is depressing for me lol.