Inspiron 15z 5523 Notebook - 3 beeps, black screen

Colm,

My laptop went to the same situation like everyone described here, I went through the posts and have opened the laptop, I can see the CMOS coin battery on mother board but I didn't figure out how can I take the CMOS out, do I need to take the motherboard out and do something at the back of the motherboard? This is my first time to open a laptop, I am kind of afraid to take everything out, can you explain a bit more how can I take CMOS battery out? Thank you.

is windows 10 stable?

may I try to use windows 10?

Hello,

First, I'd like to thank colmfarrell for writing such a detailed troubleshooting guide, I followed their instructions almost to a tee, and it worked, on the first try. My laptop is up and running again, seemingly unharmed, after having followed pretty much the same pattern:  Inspiron 15z turning on to a black screen and 3 beeps after upgrading to Windows 10. I would also like to note a couple of things:

• I didn't replace the motherboard or the CMOS battery, didn't have to.
• When trying to disconnect the battery, it seemed much easier to me to move the little switch under the keyboard, than to physically remove the battery. The trickiest part was finding the switch, it's minimal. I'm not a 100% sure, but I'd say it's somewhere under the Z key in your keyboard. You'll know when you find it because you'll see the words ON are OFF printed on the motherboard, to the sides of the switch.
• Also, after turning it on for the second time (see paragraph h of the guide), it took a little more than 5 seconds, perhaps 20 seconds, for the Dell logo to show up.

Perhaps it's also worth noting that I actually managed to revert back to Windows 8.1 on one of the rare occasions on which the laptop got past the POST (but before the 3 beeps started, my laptop just wouldn't boot up after the 3 beeps appeared for the first time). But going back to Windows 8.1 didn't fix the issue, so I had to disassemble the laptop and do what colmfarrell instructed, and just like it happened to them, all problems were solved once I successfully reflashed the BIOS.

Hi David,

Thanks for your kind words! I'm glad that it worked for you. It's nice to see that people have benefited from my post. It makes the time it took to write, well worth it :)

Colm

Hello guyz,

I followed what Colmfarrell suggested, and even was able to boot a few times but got stuck at restarting part. But now even after the following steps the system just gets stuck with start button led lit and no display. I tried multiple no of times but no luck. I even left the pc in that state for hours but nothing happened. I formatted my hard drive through another pc, but still no luck. Please suggest me what can I do?

Please help me as I don't see any other option, even the local technicians said its a motherboard issue.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks man!!!! This solved every issues I had with my laptop!

Thanks AJAD350 for letting me know!

It's nice to know that it's still helping people :)

Thanks Colm. Your reply made me try it once again, I tried it overnight and voila! it worked. As soon as I got it started, I downloaded the A05 BIOS setup and installed it right from there (by double clicking the exe file). Everything moved smooth and my pc is now back to life.

Thanks once again Colm for still helping everyone with this issue.

Thanks for letting me know :)

I had same problem about 2 months after switching to Windows 10. After reading many articles decided to change CMOS (coin-cell) battery. This did not solve problem but probably needed to be replaced anyway (clock was a problem) what I did next worked. Removed memory cover and pressed reset switch, continued to remove main battery and Hard Drive. Then pressed reset button again followed by holding power switch down for 30 seconds. Reassembled and laptop booted up. Wanted to go back to Windows 8 as so many have had this problem with Windows 10. I also wanted to recover some data before I blew out Windows 10. It seems that when I restarted the laptop a second time it went back to black screen and 3 beeps, so you may only get 1 shot at it, I ended up doing this process 3 times. Eventually got to where I was able to reload Windows 8 from Start menu using backup and recovery. Dell should warn users about trying Windows 10 on this laptop instead of saying it's untested.

Hi colmfarrell,

I tried your suggestion when i got 3 beeps first time and it worked like charm!!!... but didnt reflash bios at that time....

recently my laptop got restarted and now m back to same black screen issues with no beeps... i tried all  steps you mentioned even keeping battery out for two days but still same screen black screen....

whenever i start it boots n show LED's but no dell logo.... i do hear fan running...

any idea will be a great help here....

I can confirm to everyone that you should still NOT install windows 10.  I installed windows 10 and am now in the process of following the instructions found in this thread.  From what I think I read after I finally get it to boot up, I need to re-image the bios from a bootable USB before reinstalling windows 7 over my windows 10 build.

I don't know if Windows 10 is the culprit but this is definitely a result from a corrupted BIOS. If anyone is still seeing a black screen, try to take out the hard drive and also the mSATA SSD in the back of the motherboard then plug in and try to boot again, the goal is to have something running on the screen and then reflash the BIOS using USB method mentioned in this thread and then you're done. Everything should be back to normal if you can force the laptop to give some errors on screen by taking out components like RAM, CMOS, SSD, etc... Good luck everyone!

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Hey Colm,

First of all a HUGE THANK YOU for your tutorial. Dell support should pay you a cheque for this! (unfortunately they don't seem to care enough).

They rolled out a great and durable product, which a lot of users are still using, and left us in the cold with this Windows 10 upgrade. If it is costly for them to update drivers/BIOS for older models, they could ask for a small fee, which I would be happy to pay, instead of going through all these troubles and waste of time!

I would also like to contribute to your tutorial.

The first part of rebooting the dead laptop went great. It SHOULD definitely stay powered off overnight, like you pointed out.

The second part of reflashing BIOS, however, did not work for me. Why? Because I decided to keep Windows 10 (didn't want to go through the hustle of reinstalling). And creating a MS-DOS bootable flash drive in Windows 10 with Rufus is not possible. It seems that Microsoft removed the MS-DOS library in Windows 10, as explained here:https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/issues/545

I tried to make a bootable flash drive on another computer with Windows XP, it booted from it, but did not want to execute the 5523A05.exe. It also has something to do with Microsoft checking the computer ID.

So I found out that DELL offered a way of creating a bootable MS-DOS flash drive using an utility called Dell Diagnostic Deployment Package (DDDP). I tried it, and it flashed the BIOS before I could blink :emotion-5:

It was really fast and easy, and here is how to do it:

1. To create the MS-DOS bootable flash drive, follow the instructions here:

http://www.dell.com/support/article/bg/en/bgbsdt1/SLN143196/en

2. Download the BIOS file 5523A05.exe and copy it to the flash drive you created.

3. Restart, hit F2 and enable Legacy boot. Select Boot from USB storage device.

4. In the DOS C:\> prompt type 5523A05.EXE /FORCEIT (be sure to use /forceit, because otherwise it will show you a message that the same version of BIOS can not be installed).

5. It will ask you if you want to flash BIOS, type Y.

6. It will do it really quick, so be sure to hit again F2 after it reboots, press F9 (it will set defaults to boot options), save and exit, and it will boot into Windows again.

And there it is! Working just it used to .... probably until the next (corrupted) Windows 10 update :emotion-7: ... we'll see, I will just keep the bootable flash drive in case I need it again.