7510 No Boot Spash or Post After Configuring RAID, Bios Recovery not working

[lionsroar]

THIS IS THE SECOND POST OF THIS TOPIC. FIRST ONE VANISHED AFTER I EDITED IT. Poofed from the Message Board, Poofed from my own History page, gone.

In Short > noticed that my M7510 was sluggish at boot, and all around compared to my Latitude e6230. Opening the same web pages, same files, same documents was faster on the 2012 12" notebook.

• Decided to Configure RAID 0 across both internal Disks.
• Plugged laptop into mains, BIOS was Set to RAID mode for the SATA Operation, uEFI Boot was Enabled.
• Rebooted to ensure settings had been configured and rebooted again.
• Hit F12, Went to Device Configuration in the Boot Menu. Set up a Raid 0 Array across the disks with the default 16k stripe. Saved.
• Selected Reboot into Setup (BIOS) and.... Black Screen.

No Boot, No Post, No Error Codes, No Beeps. Just a black screen (display backlight non functional too)

• IF I press ESC+CTRL and plug in the Power the laptop enters into the BIOS RECOVERY mode, and flashes the light Amber3x and White 3X, indicating that the BIOS_IMG.rcv is not found.
• I tried Removing the Internal Disks, I tried Unplugging the CMOS battery, I have been trying the DELL BIOS RECOVERY Methods as well.
• If I do the same, with a 2GB( also tried 256MB, 512MB, 4GB etc) Flash Drive Formatted as FAT32 or FAT16 with the current bios (1.15.4) renamed to the BIOS_IMG.rcv specified, the thumbstick activity light will flash twice, then the laptop just sits doing nothing (no error or blinking codes). No Display is shown, either on the internal display or Via DP or Via HDMI.

It Will not Detect the Recovery image on (usb)CD, on USB, or from internal SATA disk.

In Feb, there was a BIOS update 1.15.4 that states that it "Updated the handling of 3rd Party Options ROM loading". I had not installed this version, and WAS/AM on Previous 1.14.4 Version String.

I've Searched the heck out of this, and found similar postings here for other dell laptops, but no one ever has a fix. Is this laptop now a very expensive brick?

[lionsroar]

Replaced Main Board, Issue Resolved.

That said, I find this silly for Three reasons :

1. This board appears to have traces for Dual Bios Chips, but is not Dual Bios Equiped, there is no reason a minor corruption should take out the entire laptop?

2. There is ample space to use socketed user replacible bios chips, it was at one time a staple on machines ( my Dell XT2 semi rugged tablet had a socketed chip 10 years ago) If it ever fried you just undo a spring clip, take the chip out, and you can reflash it easily on a eeprom flash board. OR buy a  preflashed chip : these things are like 50cents or less to make (and buy)

3. That 50c chip is soldered to the motherboard, thats then made more expensive due to non-socketed CPU...had this issue occured outside of the service period, it would have cost nearly as much to fix as to just buy a new FASTER computer...

If any engineer stumbles on this Please take note and think about it in the future...to have servicible parts.