First of all, that's a typo on my part, it's actually the Alienware 15 R3 . That said, things did finally get worked out, but not without a bit of pain and suffering. I'll also add a sermon that I keep on repeating: "DO YOUR BACKUP".
I did actually find the updated drivers, but a note to AMD is that they really ought to have a better search capability on their web page. That aside, I downloaded them, unzipped them, fired up device manager, found the three AMD looking devices, and did the "update drivers" thing, pointing them at what I'd just downloaded.
Everything goes through without a hitch, "Great!" I think to myself, "let's get this update happening." Reboot the machine since I've just updated core drivers and ... nothing. System won't boot. Cutting a long story short, I eventually used my wife's computer to D/L the 1903 update via the media creation tool and put it on a USB drive. Booted that, got to the point where you select where you want to install Windows and it shows my C: drive as completely empty. Not even a partition table on it. Go through, install 1903, restore stuff that needs restoring from the backup, install apps, and we're good to go. That would have been seriously painful in the absence of backup, which is why I repeat that sermon. Some day it'll save you.
Next step, crack open device manager, and see what's what with these devices. They're now using what I presume are the default drivers that come with Windows 10, showing as "Standard NVM Express controller". Getting curious now, I looked in, and saw the Vendor ID again. I don't know why this never occurred to me first time, but VEN_1C5C isn't AMD. As we all know, AMD are VEN_1002. That should have been a huge red flag that something was wrong, A little googling shows that VEN_1C5C is an outfit called SK hynix.
I'd really like to find out why AMD drivers work with a device from a completely different manufacturer, but unfortunately the drivers I'd downloaded were a victim of the data loss on my C: drive. A brief perusal of the .inf files might have been very enlightening.
The best guess I have as to how it got that way is one of two things. The previous OS I had installed was the Alienware specific version of Windows, supposedly specifically configured for my system, downloaded from Dell's web page. Plus I've had Dell SuportAssist running, which among other things, updates my drivers for me.
About all I can conclude is that one of the two was responsible for this particular mess, so with a pristine version of Windows 10 that hasn't been touched by Dell, I've just not bothered installing their SupportAssist software. I'll handle my own device diver updates manually, thank you very much. This isn't the first time I've been burned by automatic driver updates doing more harm than good, hopefully it will be the last.
I appreciate the help and support I've got here, if anyone ever does download the latest version of the AMD raid drivers, take a quick peek in the .inf file after you've unzipped them and let me know if there's any references to VEN_1C5C in there.
Peace all. Out.
