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November 9th, 2018 02:00
Precision Tower 3420 BIOS crash after backup restore
After the restore of a clonezilla backup including 2 different operating systems on one SSD, the WS is no longer booting. The DELL logo appears, if you press F2, the machine tries to enter the bios Setup, but nothing happens any more, you get a blank screen an the machine is "bricked".
There is no chance to boot any more. This is now happening the 2nd time. The only workaround is to replace the MB completely through DELL support! I fear, the next time i will try to restore the machine, the BIOS crashes again. DELL just replaces the MB instead of doing some investigation on the issue. I never experienced a machine, where you do a restore (clonezilla tells you everything during the restore worked fine) and the machine is in a "bricked" state.
The backups are UEFI based with an EFI Partition on a GPT disk layout. I think, clonezilla tries to restore the EFI variables in BIOS and then, the BIOS is in an unusable state. I think, it could not be that an UEFI env variables restore "bricks" the complete machine, there might be an error in the BIOS and DELL has to investigate the problem.
Did anyone experience a similar problem with the T3420 and solved this anyhow?
Clonezilla-version clonezilla-live 2.5.5-32 amd64 booting from UEFI-USB stick with restoredisk command.
regards
Stefan
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_abednego
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November 20th, 2018 11:00
Don't worry, I do not think your machine is really bricked.
What happens if you remove the power and data cables from the solid state drive?
If it works you may consider secure erasing the drive on another computer and reinstalling both operating systems. If not you may want to reset BIOS by means of the PSWD and RTCRST jumpers on the motherboard (see p. 23 of the workstation owner's manual for details) or by removing and reseating the CMOS battery:
https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln284985/how-to-perform-a-bios-or-cmos-reset-and-or-clear-the-nvram-on-your-dell-system
I am not sure it may work on EFI or just legacy BIOS but it is worth a try. A few years ago it was possible bricking some motherboards (don't remember the manufacturer) by setting too large EFI variables, but this problem should be fixed now. I think Dell was not affected.
At last, if you are able to go into recovery mode (pressing "Ctrl+Esc" while turning on the computer) you may be able to clear NVRAM from here.