Precision 3420 turning OFF secure BOOT renders it unusable

Thank you for your answer. This is very insightful. Good to know that Joe's brothers should get off the Dell's turf. We already did.

thanks again,

Val

The reason I stress UBUNTU 12.04.5 is that earlier versions can be risky.   There are also a number of people who demand that dell support CENTOS, SUSE,  MINT, etc.    There aren't enough resources to support every distro out there.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/booting-linux-instead-of-windows-8-bricks-some-samsung-laptops/

Dell started supporting 12.04 LTS with the Sputnik project.

https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-precision

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop?c=us&l=en&s=biz

Dell want's to hear from you! Help us evolve these systems in an open environment.

Read and contribute to the Sputnik forum. Check out Sputnik news and reviews and get project details at Dell TechCenter.

Dell provides support for many things including software.  However this support is not free.  Redhat support is also not free.  Ubuntu support is also not free.

Dell can even send an engineer to help you build and image of the software you want and then order that directly from dell at the factory.

None of these services are free however.

The contract for one onsite engineer where I am is $250,000 a year for a dedicated engineer.  The Red Hat licenses end up being about $1000 per server and that doesn't include support.

Hi SpeedStep,

Thank you for your answer. I went over many steps with Dell tech support, including CMOS reset, HDD disconnected, memory swapping, you name it. Both machines were bricked for good in my case.

Val

Actually the systems we got were indeed with Ubuntu pre-installed. First system was the worse. After turning on the machine for the first time the pre-installed Ubuntu got stuck at boot screen. It was impossible to boot it. The second system we received did finally boot Ubuntu successfully.  Both machines got bricked though after turning those options in UEFI.

For other people out there this is indeed a very useful thread. I spent hours debugging this issue with Dell tech support for 2 of those machines. It is much easier as a user to try a few things by yourself, like SpeedStep already mentioned, and maybe you are lucky and some of these might work for you.

Before working inside this computer is important to discharge any static electricity left there. So first step is to remove the power cable then press the start button. You will see the computer will try to come to life for a split second and stop afterwards. After doing this is safe to proceed with any work you might want to try. Also note there are 2 ways of reseting the CMOS, at least this was true for the 2 machines we got. You can use the old way of removing the coin battery or use the reset jumpers on the MB.

Val

We knew about these options as well. But again, in our case we wanted no software support from Dell, an option hard to "buy" from Dell. And this case has nothing to do with software support whatsoever. There are 2 options in UEFI: Disable Secure Boot and Enable Legacy Boot. Turning these On will brick the machine. This has nothing to do with software support. This looks more like a defective UEFI implementation.

Val

The drives you have are windows.   If you erase the drives and install windows or linux or whatever onto a blank drive with secure boot off it works.  The bricking appearance is microsoft's fault for not allowing to install 32 bit os not from microsoft .   Ubuntu installs on these systems with secure boot on or off.    The exact scenario you say I have tried and it works fine when cmos is cleared and you start with blank drives.

Dell does not sell Bare systems with no os.

 I was also able to pre order a unit online with ubuntu installed.

Dell will only support systems with the os that they came with.

If you disconnect the hard drive and disable secure boot and remove the cmos battery it will unbrick the unit and allow installation of Linux with secure boot off.   I just tried this and my 3420 was not bricked.  The UEFI boot entry and corrupt NVRAM after turning secure boot off is what is causing the black screen of death.   If you purchased these systems with Linux pre installed this would not be an issue.

I agree to some extend that asking Dell to provide support for all Linux distros out there might be relatively too much atm. My request was exactly the opposite though. I wanted zero support from Dell regarding the software I was about to install on this desktop computer.  Apparently this is impossible to accomplish. 

Thank you for the posted links, they are very useful. But just to clarify this is not a case like the one related with samsung laptops. Here we did not boot any other operating system. Simply just disabling Secure Boot and Enable Legacy will brick the machine. No other external software is required to accomplish this except the UEFI the Dell Precision 3420 comes with.

Val

The install must be done with a blank drive if you start out with a secure boot setup.

Blank drive and cleared cmos works.

Black screen of death crashes are not a bricked machine.

The other caveat is that you must use UBUNTU 12.04.5 or Red Hat and it must be the 64 bit version of the os.

I keep a windows 2 go drive and a bootable USB linux drive specifically for this.

In my case both were bricked. To give you more details, together with Dell tech support we started the second machine debugging by removing the HDD and memory. Obviously rebooting like this will trigger the expected beep alarm and the power LED will be yellow if I remember the color code correctly. We added next the memory, and we tried to boot plugging the memory in different slots. Then we added the HDD back.

To understand this correctly, did you start by reformatting the drive and after that changing the UEFI options?

Val