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Precision T7600 won't boot
I patched one of my T7600 workstations and now it won't boot, displaying orange led 3 & 4.
If I remove the CMOS battery for a while and the RAM then I get led 1.
The patch included a bios upgrade to A13 so I'm wondering if I have a corrupted bios and if so how to get around this?
Paul
DELL-Alasdair R
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February 5th, 2018 06:00
Hi Paul,
3 & 4 LEDs indicate a memory error (assuming the power LED is white)
The 1 LED you see after removing the battery and memory signifies that no memory modules were detected, which is to be expected.
When you removed the battery did you also disconnect the mains power cable? If not, I would recommend doing so and also holding in the power button for a few seconds to drain any residual power. If this doesn't resolve the issue all you can do is troubleshoot the memory error, there isn't any way of recovering the BIOS.
The quickest way to do this would be to try re-seating the DIMMs and if that doesn't help, swapping in memory from another, working, T7600.
Do you know what level the BIOS was at prior to the update? What else does your patching process involve?
pwhatcher
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February 5th, 2018 06:00
Alasdair
I'm pretty sure that the machine was at A12 before hand - the other were patches to Windows 2012 R2 which isn't significant for the problem
I'll try the memory, can you confirm what the minimum number of DIMMs required to boot is as ISTR that they had to be installed in 2s or 4s, but I'm not sure if that was an absolute requirement or just to get the maximum memory bandwidth
The machine had been running for over a year without re-boot which is why I'm surprised it failed on re-boot - wasn't picking up changes from the WSUS server, hence why I was patching it
Regards
Paul
DELL-Alasdair R
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February 5th, 2018 08:00
If it's a single CPU, you need to have DIMMs in slots 1 and 2. If it's two CPUs, you'll need a DIMM in slot 1 on both banks. Only configurations with 2, 4 or 8 DIMMs in each bank/per CPU are supported.
There isn't much difference between A12 and A13, A13 was only released because of the Intel AMT/ME vulnerabilities so it's not likely for it cause memory issues if it got corrupted.
BlakeThoennes
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May 28th, 2018 12:00
This thread came up with a google search while I attempted to find an answer to BIOS UPDATE A15 for Precision T7600 Towers... Dell Command Pushed a15 to me as a urgent bios update require reboot.
It installed fine, reboot, and bios update completed fine, but now windows won't complete its boot. Booting to a usb recovery works, and bootrec /fixboot /rebuildbcd works without access denied (if you assign drive letter to system partition on primary disk)... but i am unable to repair my existing windows installation on a sata line (non-raided). The OS is UEFI and i have attempted to add the boot manager manually.
I am not installing windows 10 to a secondary disk, if it succeeds i will attempt to DOWNGRADE from a15 to a14 (which was stable prior to updating)...
I know I should start a new thread, and I will, but this thread is already propagated throughout google and was relevant to my search. Hoping someone else sees this and we can chime in together that this bios update is a failure.