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September 4th, 2004 17:00
Laptop not booting after bios upgrade
I upgraded my bios to A16 today from A06 on a Latitude C610 and now it won't boot. Not even to the Dell screen that gives you the information about the version of the bios. When I turn the power on, the harddrive starts and the Caps Lock light starts blinking - but the screen shows nothing. After about 3 or 4 seconds it powers off.
Any idea what I can do to get the machine back? I have a floppy drive in it with a boot disk, but it isn't even looking at it. I never had a bios password, but it acts like it isn't getting past the bios... Any help is apprciated!!!
Thanks,
Jason
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Ed C
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September 5th, 2004 01:00
Jason Haley
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September 5th, 2004 10:00
I used the floppy disk method. When it was running everything came up on the screen ok, like flashing bios, percent complete, then loading bios, etc and to an a: prompt after. Once I rebooted is when I started getting the flashing caps lock light (can't find anything on the net that tells me what that means) and not booting.
I took it apart and unplugged the battery on the motherboard (I forget what you call it) last night. This morning I tried booting it without plugging in the battery and got a different behavior than last night which was the machine came on like before but it had a prompt (no drive prompt, just a pipe looking character) and no flashing caps lock light. But when I tried again with the batter plugged in, same behavior as yesterday.
Ed C
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September 5th, 2004 13:00
Remove the hard drive and make sure you have the floppy drive installed with a boot floppy in the drive and the BIOS flash on it and see if it will boot from the floppy drive. The notebook will always boot from the floppy drive if the HDD is removed. That is if it will boot at all. You will also need the battery installed to do the flash but you can force it to flash the BIOS again without the battery by using the /forceit switch at the end of the BIOS name. So it would look like this.
A:\BIOSname.exe /forceit
That's a space between the BIOS name and the forward slash.
Jason Haley
6 Posts
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September 5th, 2004 13:00
I tried what you suggested. It won't start the floppy drive. If I put in the cd drive with a boot disk, it will start to spin, but the laptop is killing the power after about 4 seconds like before.
This morning I remebered that I also did a firmware update on my cd/dvd drive yesterday too, what can go wrong with a firmware update?
The fact that it won't even get to a boot screen seems to make me think it is the bios, but what do I know...
Ed C
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September 5th, 2004 19:00
Jason Haley
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September 13th, 2004 18:00