Inspiron 15z 5523 Notebook - 3 beeps, black screen

Anyone hear back from Dell yet?

Update:

I have finally got my laptop booting on the regular again.   I have done a restore back to windows 8.1 and after many, 100+ times, trying to power on the laptop and get it tot POST, it finally powered back on.  I re-flashed the BIOS with the latest A5 code.   I have rebooted the laptop about 15 time since with no issues, so I am hoping its fixed now.   I want to upgrade to Windows 10, but I think that it will be awhile before I go down that road with this laptop.

I am hoping Dell makes this right and either fixes this issues or at least take this laptop off from the Windows 10 compatibility list.

After lots of back and forth with @dellcares via private message, and providing them lots of details on the problem, they come back to me and say "oh, we just noticed the system is out of warranty, please contact our out of warranty team". Can you believe this? The FIRST thing I told them is that my system is out of warranty and the outs of warranty team only wants to sell me a new motherboard. Dell is not taking any responsibility for this at all. Has anyone else had any luck? See their reply below:

"Thanks, We will make a note of these. We also see the system is out of warranty now so for any repair you will have to talk to our out of warranty sales team. ^SN"

This is not the warranty sales team we should contact, but the customer service, and consumer protection organizations. We all should make a complaint. I will, in any case.

I exactly have this problem! I install windows 10 but my laptop (inspiron 15z 5523) is dead, black screen and three beeps. I'm a computer science and i need my laptop to work! I'm trying to resolve this issue with every suggest (CMOS battery, ecc) but the problem persist.
Why dell says that pc is compatible with windwos 10?
My pc is out of warranty and dell asked me 130 euros for problem diagnostic for this issue that I think is our problem (probably bios is corrupted).
Can Dell behave like that? Why Dell cannot reply?
Sorry for my bad english

Nothing yet. Looks like it only works for people who know how to handle their computers and are IT savvy...any suggestions for the less tech people here?? Dell would probably just want us to pay for a new motherboard!

I am just waiting for some response or help

Jesse

Had the same problem after downloading windows 10. For those that can't or don't want to take their laptops apart try this: sounds silly and it did to me at first until i tried it and it worked. If it doesn't work no harm done by trying. Its not your mother board. Its a bios issue.

with computer off HOLD DOWN D KEY - While at the same time hit the start button. Let go the start button but keep pressing the D key

I had to do this 4 times before the screen lit up. when it does let go the D key;  It will cycle through a start up - let it do its thing without you doing anything. I believe that as the system reboots it automatically update the bios  it worked for me. If not look at the other threads in this community for suggestions. Good luck  

Has anyone found a solution for this that works consistently?

I'm facing the exact same problem.

I've a 15Z 5523 model. I installed Windows 10 on it 25 days ago, and all worked fine until about 3 days ago.

Initially it wouldn't boot with just a black screen. No Dell logo, not option to enter BIOS nothing.

Power would come on to light the keyboard, and I'd hear the CD click. The HDD would give a half second light then go out and stay out. Nothing else would happen.

Maybe every 30 second or 1 minute it would kill the power itself and try again to start up.

I left it like that for maybe an hour while I went to research the problem and came back to find that it had started up! Yea I though! A temporary problem that's fixed. However after shutting down again it would not start up. I left it like that over night and the next day it had started gain. So I did a full system backup. I realised that I could "restart" it without any problem but a power down and power up wouldn't work unless I left it along for hours.

Then after a day or so, it would no longer power up at all. Initially the hard drive ran for ages...I left it run over night but it was still running the next day and nothing had appeared on screen. So I powered it down by holding down the power button.

Then I get three beeps and nothing else when I tried to start it.

Last night I watched some youtube videos and learned hot to open up the laptop and remove the CMOS battery. I remove the main batter, HDD and the CMOS battery. Waited a few minutes and put it all back together again.

Initially the HDD spun up and was "doing something" but no dell logo, no BIOS entry point and nothing on screen. After an hour I powered it down by holding the power button, and now I'm back to the three beeps.

I've tried removing the CMOS battery on three further occasion and no change....no hard disk activity and just three beeps.

It's incredible to see that on the Dell support forums that this has been a known problem since the begining of August, and there is no warning about it and no solution from Dell.

Does anyone here have any other suggestions, or anything else worth trying?

Thanks

Colm

replace battery. just under acess door to memory modules there is a small hole on frame  where you put a paper clip to "reset" startup.  when you start up hold D key when you hit start button. should boot. if not power off. hold down D key as you hit start button once again.  I did this procedure 4 x then it booted and reset bios. as it boots do nothing. let it di it's thing. good luck.

good luck....  I dealt with this one for over a month,  tried many different things, including a new motherboard.  from doing a combination of using the reset button by the memory and removing the CMOS battery, power cycling 40-50 times in a row.  one of the few times that I got it to boot, I did a system re-image back to windows 8.  after finally going through this process it has been stable now running windows 8.1.

it just *** that this is a realitivly new laptop that i cant upgrade to windows 10, because I am sure it will cease to boot after a while.  and Dell's website says that this laptop is compatible with windows 10.

I wish Dell would make this right, but Im sure nothing will happen.

Thanks guys. I really appreciate your suggestions. While I'm prefectly comfortable working with computers, and expect little difficulty getting it working again if I can get as far as the Dell logo, I've little experience with the internals of computers. So it took a lot of desperation for me to actually open up the machine and get at the battery.

I'm becoming quite used to it now!

Despite attempting various fixes last night, it still doesn't work.

I tried contacting Dell, and they insisted that the motherboard is gone and want €970 to replace it, or will give me 15% off a new one! I pointed them to all the threads online about this problem and it not being the motherboards, by they were having none of that. Someone from Customer Services is supposed to call me this afternoon, but I was told that they won't say anything different.

I will try the two suggestions above tonight....I'd not come across the reset button previously, so hopefully it adds something new to the equasion.

If that doesn't work, I'll take my complaint to the small claims court. The laptop is too new to have the motherboard failed, and from what I can see online this seems to be so common it has to be a design fault.

If by some miracle I manage to get it booted up again, should I immediately format the hard drive and go back to Win 8.1? Has anyone managed to keep it running under W10 successfully? (It ran perfectly under W10 for me for 3 weeks before this problem). While I didn't mind W8.1 I develop software for a hobby and you can't develop for Windows 10 unless the machine is operating on Win 10. So it would be a bit disappointing if I can't keep W10 in the longer term.

That's not to mention the hassle of having to restore W8.1 from a clean install and having to replace all my software. I'm too late to have the option of restore W10 to 8.1 from the Windows revert option.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. You are far better than Dell's technical support. I will go these suggestions a try tonight!

Hi guys,

The reset button mentioned in average joe joe's post and erohen's post has been helpful but not yet the solution.

I've discovered that by removing the CMOS battery, and turning the little battery switch underneath the keyboard to off (which cuts the main battery off from the motherboard, AND pressing this reset button, that on next power up the three beeps are gone. However what happens next varies a bit.

Some times nothing happens at all, and eventually (after many minutes) I power it down. The when I attempt to power up again, I get the three beeps again.

However some times, the hard disk spins up and I get lots of activity on it! I left it running for a few minutes, but nothing happened on screen. No dell logo, no possibility to get into the boot menu.

Holding down the D didn't make any difference.

So I remove the CMOS battery totally (makes it easy to reset it again without having to dismantle it again). and on the last restart that the HDD spun up, I've left it running. It's been running for almost 3 hours now without any change. The HDD is running away doing "something" but there is no evidence of life on the screen. No Dell logo, nothing. Have you guys seen this? What it like this when you got it back? If so, how long did you have to wait?

The thought crossed my mind that now my screen is gone, but I don't think that's the case, as my keyboard also isn't lighting up, and if I hit the caps lock, it doesn't like up. So it would need to be both the screen and the keyboard that are gone. Seems unlikely.

Hi guys....just an update.

I left it running like that (HDD doing something) for 16 hours, with no change evident on screen. So eventually I stopped it.

Later I was consistently able to get rid of the three beeps and get the HDD spinning up by removing the CMOS battery, removing the main battery (or using the slider under the keyboard to disable the battery) and pressing the reset button, all while main power was disconnected. If I stopped it during the HDD spinning, then I'd have the three beeps back again.

I spend all day Saturday just trying this in various combinations.... I even, in desperation tried removing the memory modules. With the memory modules removed, I get 2 beeps which correctly indicates a problem with the memory. But this didn't fix the problem.

Late last night, tired from a day of repeaditive stuff, I decided to give up and let the HDD spin for a few days to see if patience paid off. So I put everything back together, and turned it on and in INSTANTLY showed the Dell logo and booted up! Yahoo!

However despite my various attempts I could not get the reflash the bios. If I tried normally it told me that the current version was the same so it couldn't. I tried using /forceit but was told that was an unknown command. I tried other / commands such as jabit (might be misspelling that now) which is supposed to tell it to ignore the version number. Nothing worked.

I tried booting to a command problem and do it there, but that didn't work. I tried booting into safe mode but that didn't work either. It was happy enough "Restarting" which was my previous experience.

So I gave up trying to reflash the BIOS and decided to reinstall W8.1. I have a full system backup from before I installed W10 so was going to use that. It involved a reboot so that I could start from recovery media, and it crashed on reboot! No I can't get back in again! Back to square 1!

So I've spent all day today (Sunday) doing the same steps, and getting nowhere. About 10 hours now of taking it apart and putting it back together in various combinations. No luck :(

I see that I've already killed the backlighting of my keyboard, and one tiny piece of the plastic of the keyboard is now broken from poking the clips away. But the keyboard is cheap to replace and now I know how to do it :)

By the way Dell Customer Service who was supposed to call me on Friday never did. Instead the technicians supervisor did. He could do nothing other than offer to fix it for a nominal charge. This turns out to be the previously quoted €800 odd price. He offered to get Customer Service to call me tomorrow evening.

Going back to removing and reinstalling bits now and hoping and praying! Any other suggestions are welcome as are suggestions for how to force a flight of the bios if I get back in again.

Hi guys,

It turns out that there is a way to flash the BIOS even if you can't boot to the Dell logo. But I'm struggling with that method.

I found references to it in various places, but a good guide is given in this thread

https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-Dell-Inspiron-14z-5423-Bios-Recovery-Issue

Basically it involves taking the BIOS file from Dell downloads in our case 5523a05.exe. Using a dos prompt you run this file as 5523a05.exe /writehdrfile and then again as 5523a05.exe /writeromfile

This gives you two new files. 5523a05.hdr and 5523a05.rom

Then you rename this files to BMWZ5A05.hdr and BMWZ5A05.rom.

Then you create a bootable USB stick that is FAT32 and you copy those files to it.

You put the stick into the USB port (I think the one beside the HDMI port is the correct one in our case, but I've tried all four) remove the battery, remove the CMOS battery and power down the machine.

Then you hold down the END key while connecting the power cable. The computer should start by itself and use those files to reflash the BIOS. You should see the BIOS being flashed onscreen.

In my case the computer does startup but there is no activity on the screen and nothing happens.

I wonder if there is a slightly different procedure for our inspirons? Perhaps a different key to be held down?

Does anyone know about this procedure? If it works it looks like it would give us all access back to our machines.

Colm