E7420 shutting down when docking/undocking

For what it's worth I've had the same a few times on an E5440 and PR03X dock.

3 or 4 times I've pressed it down onto the dock (maybe not firmly or correctly aligned) and it immediately powers down (losing all work of course!).  I think it's also done it once or twice when removing.

If you can easily recreate it on demand I'd keep on at Dell Support and hopefully they'll get their engineering guys to investigate.

Another random and annoying "feature" I never experienced on 3 previous HP laptops!

Hi,

I've the same issue with one laptop.

Same model, I update the bios, chhhhange the docking, same issue.

Funny you should bump this, a few days ago I was holding my machine and rotated it quickly and it shutdown.

I'm thinking it might be because of the hard drive "free fall" protection.  Connecting and disconnecting from my dock creates quite a shock.

I've turned this protection off in my BIOS and will see if it happens again.

My other theory is touching/shorting contacts on the dock connector causes it.  It's hard to align the machine with the dock correctly.

I'll try to disable the free fall protection with my user.

Good idea. Updating the bios was a good solution to enable the support of usb keyborads and mice at boot on the docking.

With old bios, keyboard was inactive. User were obliged to open the laptop for the authentication.

We have a user with a E7440. When the system is undocked any bump or swift movement will cause it to shut off. I thought it might be a loose battery connection but we purchased a new battery and that hasn't solved the issue.

I started a thread about it here http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19620945 but someone pointed me this direction. It's under warranty and I will probably pursue this with warranty support but I'm worried that this isn't a motherboard issue but some other design flaw.

Let me know if that disabling free fall protection in the BIOS fixed it. It has an SSD so it doesn't need free fall protection.

We have a user with a E7440. When the system is undocked any bump or swift movement will cause it to shut off. I thought it might be a loose battery connection but we purchased a new battery and that hasn't solved the issue. I started a thread about it here http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19620945 but someone pointed me this direction. It's under warranty and I will probably pursue this with warranty support but I'm worried that this isn't a motherboard issue but some other design flaw. Let me know if that disabling free fall protection in the BIOS fixed it. It has an SSD so it doesn't need free fall protection.

Give it a try, it could be a while before I can say if it's made a diffference. My machine stays docked 99% of the time.

While I was looking in the BIOS I could see some logs that suggested it had triggered a hard disc shutdown, hence my theory.

There's absolutely nothing in the Windows logs before it happened.

Yudhistre,

Read this other thread:

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19612919

Can you force it to happen by applying pressure to the battery?

Do you get a "Battery removed" error in the BIOS log?

Lawrence.

I'm having the exact same issue. Has anyone found a way to resolve this yet?

Unfortunately we didn't. We ended up replacing it through warranty support.