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October 14th, 2009 07:00
Dimension 4400 - Can't Edit BIOS settings to resolve CMOS Display Error
Hello,
I am trying to remote troubleshoot my Aunt's Dimension 4400, but have hit a wall. I'm hoping someone can get me going again.
Background:
She returned from vacation anad tried to boot the computer, but she received a message while running POST: "CMOS Display Error". Someone told her to replace the CMOS battery which she did before contacting me. However, after replacing the battery she gets the same error message. The indicator lights (A-D) on the back of the machine are all green except for D. The Dell manual calls this an "other" confition and recommends contacting them, but I thought I would dig a little deeper. There is also a two beep beep-code durring boot attempts. According to the manual, two beeps indicates a memory problem.
I had her reseat the memory in an attempt to clear the beep code - with no change. The DIMM was originally in slot 1 so I had her move it to slot 0 - also resulted in no change. From the BIOS, the memory is properly recognized and when moved between slots the BIOS correctly recognizes the change, so I'm thinking the memory is likely okay. (The HDD is also properly recognized.)
I also thought that maybe when she replaced the CMOS battery a setting may have been lost in the BIOS, so we've also gone through all of the BIOS settings. The problem is that everytime we get to a setting I'm interesting in tweeking, it's not editable (i.e. greyed out). Actually, most configuration items are greyed out (IDE/HDD, serial, video etc). From the security menu of the BIOS options she has access to change the supervisor password so I know we're not in the BIOS as a view only user. But other than that, the only setting she can change is the date/time.
I'm hoping that if we get access to change the BIOS settings, we'll be able to get it to boot. The only other thought I have is that the system board is dead. Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance,
Jason
fireberd
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October 14th, 2009 07:00
There is an "NVRAM" clearing procedure and also a password reset procedure listed in the manual HERE
<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>
Try these and see if it helps. The NVRAM clearing seemed to fix a lot of problems in those "older" systems.
HeliNovice
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October 16th, 2009 20:00
Thanks for the idea. This did help us find the reason we could not change the BIOS settings (it turned out that we didn't have the correct supervisor password afterall, the behavior of the menu was just a little misleading.) We've now been through all of the BIOS settings. My goal was to simplify the configuration as much as possible and adjust settings that I thought may be incorrect, so I had her ...
After all of the above, except for my note about the PnP settings, there was no behavior change.
I noticed in the Boot menu, there is no device priority listed. That seems odd.
I feel like the mother board has probably died, but if anyone has other ideas on the BIOS settings, please let me know.
Thanks again,
Jason