Inspiron 17R SE (7720) tale of woe...

Hi,

My 7720, which had been fine for years, suddenly decided that it did not want to boot.

This was sporadic for a few days and now it has given up.

The symptoms are:

When switched on the keyboard lights up, the dvd drive spins, then the special keys at the top right light up one by one then go out again, then nothing but the power/charging light (the fan does not even come on). It does not get as far as the Dell logo so I'm assuming a BIOS issue.

Originally I thought it was probably a heatsink issue (and with my machine being out of warranty), so I replaced the thermal pads and tried again... same result as before.

If I hold down 'd' when powering on, the display does the self test, so I know the display is ok.

If I hold down the end key and release it when I plug in the adapter lead, the fan blows at full speed so I know the fan is OK.

If I attach a usb key with the phlash16.exe, minidos.sys and bios.wph file; the computer accesses the key but nothing happens. Which is unsurprising since I have no way to extract the bios.wph file from the 7720A16.exe file as I only have access to a linux machine at the moment and it complains when I run it under wine that the current machine does not have a phoenix bios (even when trying to extract the rom file with '/WriteRomFile').

I believe the BIOS may be corrupt (I really hope the motherboard hasn't died as I can't seem to find a cheap replacement anywhere). I have already replaced the cmos battery, just in case that could have caused my woes...

Is there any kind soul out there that can extract the 7720A16.WPH file from the exe file for me, so that I can try a phoenix crisis bios recovery in the vain hope that my beloved workhorse will spring back into life like a modern day Lazarus?, or do I need to bin this lovely machine with its i7 and nvidia gfx and buy something else to replace it?