Precision Tower 3420 not booting in AHCI after BIOS update

I can confirm too that the same issue occurs on Precision Tower 3620 with the 2.10.2 BIOS, running Ubuntu. BTW, on Ubuntu the firmware updates are automated and only requires one confirmation only to reboot to a nasty surprise.

I'm glad that there's a workaround but how long will it take Dell to at least remove the faulty firmware from the website?

Hi jonsix.

I do not trust on a firmware update —or, in general, any sort of update— that is not under my control.  This one is the reason I disable the "UEFI Capsule Firmware Updates" feature in the BIOS setup.  I like downloading firmware updates from what I consider trusted sources (usually from two or more randomly choosed networks over the city) and verify checksums (MD5, SHA1 and SHA256) before applying them from a FAT32-formatted USB stick.

I understand this plan is a nightmare for corporations that want to update hundreds of workstations quickly and easily, but works for me as I have no more than a few computers.

Edit: I am aware of Dell's Signed Firmware Update functionality and how it is used for BIOS update authentication and anti-rollback support enforced by signing keys revocation.  This feature is great, but I want full control over the update process yet.

Hi,

I was about to fetch the heavy duty toolbox and take hard-drives with SATA/SDD ACHI or whatever name is interfaces out and so on...during a sunny day, 500 m from the beach...and not particularly eager to spend it doing just that.

Enjoy this tip, I was lucky to stumble on in-between a lot of text, before you too end up there,

When they tell to: CTRL-ALT-DEL and then F12 to get into BIOS realms then the magic not mentioned is:

     HIT F12 SEVERAL TIMES - once will not do it.

After this the machine enters its usual talkative mode and can be convinced to do your biding with a little messing around!

I write this post from it after having just done the above, disabled the security heavy armour but not the ACHI (or what it is called) for the solid state SATA disk — as this is disk with root file system hence booting with software just on home file system would most likely only result in an ability to play tetris or chess the remainder of the day I suppose and that would not be very helpful progress to relax on as backdrop.

That worked; now I shut it down, and fix the rest to night and run my experiment again :)

System: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS freshly unattended auto-upgraded from 16.04 LTS and then equally unattended firmware upgraded from Dell repository; Machine is Precision Tower 3420 with SSD NVem and SSD/sata (or what those acronyms are, I type from memory, you know what it is: The cool small silent internal solid state disks).

Yours

Michael

Hi again, DELL-Alasdair R

I cannot speak for the others, but to me knowing this issue will be fixed is enough.  What really matters to me is that this issue will be fixed in a future BIOS release.

Thanks a lot to you for managing this issue, and to the BIOS team for working on the fix!

The new UEFI BIOS for the Precision Tower 3420 (version 2.11.0) works as expected.  There are no obvious regressions on this BIOS release to me.  This update is an important one, it does not only includes all changes from 2.10.2 plus the ability to boot on AHCI mode —for those of us that had been unable to successfully run the previous one— but also two additional fixes and a new Intel ME update related to six misterious CVEs that are reserved on MITRE's database but whose description is under embargo yet.

I would like to say thanks, again, to both DELL-Alasdair R and the engineering team that worked on the fix.  The new BIOS seems to work right, has a lot of improvements —not only a fix to the SATA AHCI operation mode— and has been released very quickly (on mid of august no less!).