Alienware M17x R3 Reinstallation procedure
Monday, July 25, 2011 at 9:33AM
David G (Chuzpah)

I have been getting a lot of questions related to this so I've crafted this post to share my experiences with everyone!

 When I was having issues with my SSD RAID problem I ended up with a 240GB SSD boot and a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT drive for data, games and VMs! So far this approach has worked well with no more hang ups or BSODs. This is how I installed everything.

SSD in HDD Slot 0, HD in slot 1 (there are many blog and forum posts that state you should install the SSD in slot 1, I did not find that it made any difference)

Changed boot mode to AHCI

Installed Windows 7 Ultimate (x64)

Made sure my data HD was drive D:

Manually changed Blu-Ray drive to E:

Disabled hibernation by running the following command from a Administrator Command Prompt: Powercfg -h off

Changed the location of the page file from C to D (no sense wasting HD space on the SSD)

Instead of incepting my AW resource disk to install the drivers I chose to download from the Dell website manually.

Installed drivers in the following order:

 

This configuration has been in place for weeks now with absolutely no problems! Hope it helps, let me know if you have questions. Feel free to comment and share your expereinces as well. 

Article originally appeared on Chuzpah.com (http://chuzpah.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.