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Precision Tower 7910 really liked BIOS A26, didn’t want to upgrade
Precision Tower 7910 really liked BIOS A26, didn’t want to upgrade
After Command Update failed to install BIOS A33 despite repeated attempts, I downloaded and ran the T7910A33 executable directly under Windows 10 build 2004. This showed a progress bar showed completion before the system restarted. Upon restart, the BIOS remains at A26.
I’ve placed the A33 update as well as the A27 update on a flash drive and attempted to install via “BIOS Flash Update” at boot-time, but neither succeeds. This following is displayed:
Message
Please wait while the update is processed.
This could take several minutes to finish.
Note: Your system will automatically restart after processing is complete.
Immediately after the above is shown the screen blanks. I never saw “Updating your system’s firmware.”
After I went into the BIOS and selected “Load Defaults,” I was able to update to A33 using “BIOS Flash Update.” I conclude that there are one or more BIOS settings that interfere with installation of a BIOS update beyond A26.
DELL-Cares
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July 2nd, 2020 07:00
We tried reaching you on a private message but did not receive a response. Please feel free to reply to the private message whenever you are available.
_abednego
78 Posts
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July 5th, 2020 10:00
Glad to see you were able to upgrade the firmware on your workstation after setting BIOS to defaults. I cannot be really helpful here, just want to note that I change the highly customized BIOS settings on my workstation to default every time I attempt a BIOS upgrade—to avoid mistakes, the changes applied to BIOS are written down on a text file together the default ones so I can easily reproduce, improve and review them over time.
Using a flash drive for the upgrade process is the safer way, in my humble opinion, as it is the only way to start the flashing process from a well-known and tested state (in this case the flash drive itself and its filesystem are the only variables). In fact, I like disabling the "UEFI Capsule Firmware Updates" each time I reconfigure the BIOS settings to avoid someone (or something) trying a firmware upgrade at the operating system level.
It is odd you were unable to upgrade the BIOS with current settings. The only settings that should interfere are an administrator password, in which case the workstation will ask you for the right password before upgrading the BIOS, and disabling "Allow BIOS downgrade". In both cases it should be obvious what happens and the latter should not be elicited when upgrading from an earlier BIOS release.
Perhaps you had something more exotic configured, like Intel TxT, blocking the updater. Who knows! In my humble opinion it seems you found a real bug. I have seen nothing on the release notes for BIOS A33 that notes you must apply some intermediate BIOS release between A26 and A33, so it should have worked without loading the BIOS default settings. In any case, it is great you were able to find a workaround.
BillVo
17 Posts
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July 9th, 2020 11:00
@_abednego You make some good points and I agree with all of them. I infer there's no good way to export/import Precision BIOS settings, though perhaps there should be.