Friday, May 1, 2009

Serious Dell Mini 9 Bios Upgrade Bug/Flaw Problem that will Brick your system

So you get your Dell Mini and find out that it has Bios A00 on it and the newest one is A05. So like me, you will want the latest version too. I put in the windows firmware on my USB flash drive and plugged it into the computer, i then decided to run the bios update from the floppy drive to make sure that the version was out dated. It was, so i clicked cancel and my computer started beeping and hung up. This is a bug dell has, even if you click cancel, the bios starts to auto update. I thought it was windows crashing and not the bios update, so i tried to shut the computer, when nothing worked, i pulled the battery out.

Now when i press the power button, the power light came on, but there was a blank screen. Nothing else. The system was bricked. Dell support was no help.

After days of searching i found the solution. You will need a External Floppy Drive for this to work.

Here is the fix:


1st: Get a USB Floppy (I don't know if you can use a USBKey but a floppy worked for me)


2nd: Go to http://mydellmini.com/forum/possible-experimental-bios-to-address-video-memory-p11787.html and download the file named 268076.exe.zip


3rd: Unzip the file and run the 268076.exe to create your boot floppy
4th: Get the most recent Dell bios Rom file from the dell support site.
5th: Rename it to "BIOS.WPH" and copy it to your new boot floppy (Overwrite the one currently there)
6th: On the mini...Connect USB floppy drive and insert disk
7th: Unplug the power, Hold fn+b and plug power back in, 2 lights should flicker (Watch, they flicker fast)
8th: If the machine does not power on at this point hit power
9th: Walk away.... The system should start accessing the floppy drive and you really need to walk away.
10th: The Floppy will stop reading but still do not touch, it will eventually reboot itself (10 - 15 minutes in my case)


On reboot there will be a checksum error press F1 NOT F2 and let the bios run at least one time, it will figure it all out.
And you should be fixed.

Dell needs to fix this problem. It is serious.

No comments: