XPS 8930, cannot access BIOS

@jlogicbud - Is the monitor turned on before you power the PC on? How much RAM is in this PC?

At this point, you probably should contact Dell Tech Support for assistance. It's a new PC and this is not normal behavior.

BTW: Disabling Fast Start on my XPS 8930 (Micron SSD; NVidia card), and on my Inspiron laptop (HDD) causes a significant delay in booting and shutting down. I re-enabled it on both.

On my lappy, the screen stays blank for about 1 min (no splash screen) and then suddenly there are spinning dots for another min or so and then a "please wait" and then "welcome" with more spinning dots, before it finally loads to the desktop. And it's not just trying to install updates during these delays because the PC is fully updated.

@jlogicbud Have you tried changing the Source Control in the On-Screen Display of your monitor to your video source (either HDMI or DVI) instead of the default which requires the monitor to determine the source?

@RoHe I don't see the behavior you are describing after disabling Fast Startup. On a laptop, I can understand slower bootup because sometimes laptops have 5400 rpm HDDs, but shutdown should be faster because with Fast Startup disable it does not have to save the hibernation file. On a desktop booting from an SSD, I would not expect to see much difference (maybe several seconds) whether or not Fast Startup was enabled or disabled. I don't understand the reason for this behavior.

@jlogicbud Just curious, how did you finally access the BIOS? Did you reset the CMOS?

Having stuffed about and read everything on this forum, I found that the critical thing was that I had my screen (DVI cable) plugged into the onboard DVI rather than the separate graphics card DVI.

Suddenly, the F2 worked without trouble.

I had also noted with interest the additional Power / Sleep settings in Windows 10 (I have Build 2004). My startup is super-fast with an M2 500GB SSD but I would be quite happy with the standard "slow" fine configurations in the augmented Power/Sleep  Windows Settings.

Before plugging my DVI cable in the correct place, I had changed USB keyboards, mouse devices, the wireless dongle that connects to wireless KB and mouse, etc. 

I must have spent hours in aggregate stuffing about when plugging into the right port would have fixed my problems.

@WesternWombat According to the Setup and Specifications, the XPS 8930 only has two onboard graphics ports, one DisplayPort and one HDMI. Instead of 'onboard DVI', perhaps you are using some sort of DVI to DisplayPort or DVI to HDMI adapter with your DVI cable.

in my initial post, just substitute DP (Display Port) for DVI. 

Having stuffed about and read everything on this forum, I found that the critical thing was that I had my screen (Display Port cable) plugged into the onboard Display Port rather than the separate graphics card DVI.

Suddenly, the F2 worked without trouble.

I had also noted with interest the additional Power / Sleep settings in Windows 10 (I have Build 2004). My startup is super-fast with an M2 500GB SSD but I would be quite happy with the standard "slow" fine configurations in the augmented Power/Sleep  Windows Settings.

Before plugging my Display Port cable in the correct place, I had changed USB keyboards, mouse devices, the wireless dongle that connects to wireless KB and mouse, etc. 

I must have spent hours in aggregate stuffing about when plugging into the right port would have fixed my problems.

Hello, I see you are looking for assistance. If you need our help, you could start a private message with us and we will be happy to assist you.

I ran into this same issue. I have multiple monitors and was using DisplayPort-to-HDMI and HDMI-to-HDMI. Couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get to BIOS. My 8930 has 1 DisplayPort and 1 HDMI up top by the USB and neither worked. There are 4 more ports on the graphics card itself. I used one of those DisplayPort’s and it worked right away. Maybe the upper ones don’t work until the system has fully booted? Either way that worked for me. 

@logan1155  When you have an add-in video card, at least one monitor has to be connected to that card before you connect a monitor to any of the onboard video ports.

First of all, F12 is the default key to enter bios in Dell. The problem you are having is a cable/port issue. If you are having this problem with your Dell Desktop PC and you are using HDMI cable, I advice you switch port, insert the HDMI cable to another port, this should work. if that doesn't work, i advice you use a VGA cable. I was having this issue and I try all I could for more than 3 hours, and when i inserted the HDMI cable to another slot on my Desktop, i was able to see Dell Logo and f12 took me straight to bios. Hope this helps.

@Zach16  Sorry, F12 is not the default key to enter BIOS setup on any Dell PC. F2 is the correct key to open BIOS setup.

F12 is used to open the "one time" menu where you can select a different boot drive, run hardware diagnostics, etc.

If your PC has an add-in (AMD or NVidia) video card, the first monitor has to be connected to that card. It sounds like you originally connected it to the onboard Intel Graphics HDMI port which is disabled at least until at least one monitor is connected to the add-in card. And recent PC models have a BIOS setting that has to be enabled to use an onboard Intel video port...

VGA is ancient tech. The XPS 8930 PC in this thread doesn't even have a VGA port, and very few monitors support VGA because it's a low quality analog signal, not a digital signal...