Dell BIOS Bug

You will have to contact Dell Tech Support direct.  This forum is users helping users (not Dell employees).

I have been unable to get to the correct Dell people to address this issue and so I hoped someone on this forum would know how to.

If you post details of the issue here, we can alert the Dell Forum Liasions and they may be able to connect you to the right technical people...

Always include the PC model in your posts :emotion-5:, and in this case, the version of BIOS you think has an error.

Ron

I have asked the customer for the exact BIOS version number.  (I'll post it when he gives it to me.)  The computer is a brand new T7500.

The problem is that the Dell BIOS cannot enumerate the PCI devices on our hardware.  This works on every other computer we have tested on, including Mac and Linux computers.  The only known failure is with Dell BIOS.

Here is a .jpg that shows the PCI bus topology of our hardware which the Dell BIOS is unable to enumerate.

I flagged this for the Liasions to review...

Ron

Thanks, Ron!

You're welcome.

Keep in mind that I'm not a Dell employee and have no inside info on their BIOS code, etc. And I can't promise that a Liasion will review this thread or have a techie contact you. :emotion-5:

Ron

Customer responded with computer information:  Precision T7500, Dual Six Core Intel® Xeon® Processor X5690, BIOS A09.

Boyd Edmondson,

I have sent this thread to the Dell engineers for review. Once I hear back from them I will post back here on this thread with their response.

Thank you so much!

Thanks Jesse. :emotion-21:

Ron

I have an update on this issue.  It may be that a PCI chip is partially failing.  I would still like to continue trying to get Dell BIOS Engineers to confirm the previously diagramed topology is supported, in case the chip turns out to be good.

We moved the previously confirmed working hardware device to another (non-Dell) computer.  That computer BIOS reported an error when our hardware device is attached:  "System Configuration Data Write Error".

I read that error as, "the BIOS tried to write PCI config information to the hardware device during PCI enumeration and the write failed."  This would mean that one of the hardware device's PCI interface chips is bad.

We had a low level tool that could access one part of the chip.  It all passed.  That chip is composed internally of two sub chips though, each with their own PCI enumeration registers, so it is possible that part of the chip is good and part is bad.

We are re-obtaining the device so we can test for a bad chip.

The device passed testing before shipment and is in a secure container with "shock watch" indicators.  It may be some ball grid array was marginal and broke in shipping, or something, and now fails.

Boyd,

I sent you a private message requesting information.

The customer reports that the same Verasonics VDAS hardware works fine on a DELL T3500.  So, DELL BIOS on T7500 fails but the T3500 BIOS works.

DELL has provided a solution to this problem.  (A Non-Disclosure Agreement ("NDA") prevents me from providing more details.)

Thanks to everyone on this thread for helping get this problem resolved.