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BIOS A16 - BIOS screen progress bar goes past 100%
I have been living with the following incredibly frustrating situation for 2 years; can anyone think of what I can do to fix it?
I flashed the BIOS of my XPS 435T from A15 to A16. Power was not interrupted during the process and I received no error messages. I'm running Win 7 64 Pro. Since the flash to A16, during a cold power up or system restart, Windows fails to load. What I see is the black BIOS start-up screen with the circular DELL logo and the white progress bar at the bottom. The progress bar starts at 0 and creeps up to almost 100, then shoots past the right-most edge of the progress bar and keeps advancing toward the right-most edge of the screen. Given enough time, it will actually wrap around and will never end.
The only way to get past this is to hold down the power button during this process until the machine powers off. I then unplug the power cable from the back of the PC and wait 30 seconds until the LED power indicator on the back of the case goes dark. Power plug gets reinserted and I hold down power button until system starts up. Windows will load now.
I worry that powering down the PC in this way will only work a limited number of times.
Has anyone else experienced this or have ideas as to what I can do to make it boot properly? Thank you.
RoHe
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January 7th, 2013 15:00
Have you tried clearing BIOS?
*If motherboard battery is more than ~2-3 years old, this might be the time to replace it with a fresh CR2032 lithium ion battery, ~$2-$3 at discount stores.
BearcatBrian
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February 21st, 2013 10:00
Thank you very much for your suggestion.
I went to Radio Shack and bought a new CR2032 lithium ion battery and anti-static wrist strap. The battery was easily replaced.
Upon initial restart, all went well. I had to enter correct time and date under CMOS. I exited and saved BIOS setup and Win7 64 started normally. I was relieved that the BIOS weirdness with the progress bar going past 100% and Win never starting was over.
I have 2 external USB hard drives (2GB West. Digital), so I powered down, connected External HDDs, and restarted. This time, the BIOS weirdness was back and Win never started.
I'll admit, I believe I skipped step 5 between removing the old battery and installing a new battery: Press/hold power button for ~30 sec. Could this one missed step have prevented my system from working properly or is something else going on? I do not believe Dell released any BIOS updates after A16 for the Dell 435T / XPS 9000, otherwise I'd update.
RoHe
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February 21st, 2013 16:00
It sounds like the boot options in BIOS setup (page 31) are wrong after you reset BIOS to the defaults (by removing the battery) and it's attempting to boot from an external HDD - which it can't do.
Disconnect the external HDDs again. Reboot and press F2 before Windows starts to load. Look for Boot Settings Configuration, and see how that's set. If it's set to "Allow boot from USB", disable that option. Then look for Hard Disk Boot Priority and make sure it's set for the correct boot hard drive. Finally, make sure First Boot Device is set to Hard Drive. (Removable is the default value, so this is most likely why it might be trying to boot from USB.)
Be sure to save the changes before exiting Setup.