ASF2 force off - diagnosing a root cause

This issue is incredibly frustrating because there doesn't appear to be any consistency to it. After 10 days of my machine being stable, it powered off early this morning when idle. There were no indications of any activity in my Windows logs. Once again, the only notification was the message in the BIOS events saying ASF2 force off.

This time, I restored all BIOS settings to their defaults (I don't think I had changed anything anyways) and tried disabling C-states which is something I found in this related post.

Welcome to the Dell Community  @prodonjs 

Have you tried this???

Go into your BIOS and make note of the "SATA Operation"

Remove AC, Battery and Base Cover.

Disconnect BIOS/RTC battery.

If you have a meter check the battery at this time. "Should be 2 - 3 volts"

Connect "AC Only" and power-on for just a few seconds.

Power down remove AC, reconnect BIOS/RTC battery or replace if less than 2 volts then reassemble.

Best regards,

U2

@prodonjs 

SATA Operation settings: 

Before making any BIOS change see what the setting is??? "ATA, AHCI or RAID"

As for purchasing a replacement battery I would try any local "Mom Pop" computer shop first.

This can come in handy.

How to Read Shutdown and Restart Event Logs in Windows:

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/78335-read-shutdown-logs-event-viewer-windows.html

Let us know what you find.

U2

Thanks for the response. What should I be looking for with respect to the SATA Operation setting?

It sounds like your instructions are for validating the CMOS battery. I am inclined to just buy a new one since I believe they're a less than $20 part. Can you recommend a good source? I see a lot that claim to be applicable on eBay/Amazon but I'm reluctant to purchase without knowing if they're reputable.

The strangest thing to me about my machine's behavior is that most of the other posts that indicate this ASF2 Force Off issue seem to be more regular in frequency, whereby people's systems won't remain on for more than a few minutes. Mine are highly sporadic with days/weeks between shut offs. In addition, they always seem to occur in the middle of the night when the system is not under any kind of load. I've ran through all of the Dell Diagnostic checks both from Windows and from the BIOS and have not seen any failures, nor has the system shut down during those times. That at least leads me to believe that it's not a core hardware component (RAM, SDD, GPU) issue.

Are you aware of any way to examine logs from the system component that would dictate that the machine shut itself down? That's the one thing I wish I could see to determine where to look for a problem.

The SATA setting is RAID and that appears to be what the BIOS default was.

As far as the Windows logs go, the only thing I ever see when these events occur is a 6008 "previous shutdown was unexpected" message. None of the messages that precede those events seem to give any clear pattern as to what was going on in the system that might have led to the shutdown. It feels like the issue is at the chipset/BIOS level so I was hoping there might be a way to access lower-level logs, perhaps through something that the BIOS exposes or something that can be queried through some other tool.

Thank you!

Citrix Receiver turned out to be one of the main suspect now. I have managed to upgrade to the latest Bios version again, all I had to do was disable C state in Bios and battle Citrix Receiver out of my system. I say battle out, because it kept stealth installing back and causing the Shut down again.
So I've also disabled all software not related to Windows in msconfig for Startup.

Maybe this will help someone - who knew such a passive software could cause this big conflict? Of course Citrix has always been installed and forgotten in the background for the past 3 years, only after updating Windows and Dell Bios a few months ago this started acting up and somehow got related?

I can still say that my system is in conflict, fans are usually torqued up while the AC adapter is in, even if it\s doing nothing, it has waves of the fan over-doing it's job. At least it not shutting down...yet

Other things I have did in the Advanced Power Management to get to this stable system environment:

Processor Power Management:

Minimum Processor State, Plugged in set at 0%

System Cooling Policy:

Plugged in changed to Passive

For any unlucky soul searching for answers, my "ASF2 force off" issue seems to have been caused by the CMOS battery. A £6 replacement from eBay did the job for me.

More specifically, I bought a used XPS 9570 which would reboot from the Windows desktop occasionally. When I first got the machine, it would last 30–60 minutes before rebooting. The issue was also absent entirely in Fedora Linux, at least initially, but eventually that changed. The more I used the machine, the more quickly it seemed to reboot. In the worst case, the machine would reboot very soon after the bootloader handed control to the kernel about halfway through the overall boot sequence, both in Windows and Linux. Leaving the laptop aside for a week would significantly increase the time that it would last for, however.

Eventually, I assumed the issue stemmed from a faulty motherboard, and so bought a used Precision 5530 to swap parts with. After combining the two machines, the Precision motherboard with its own CMOS battery did once exhibit the issue, but swapping in the main battery from the Precision resolve that. At this point, I put the issue down to the main battery, although earlier testing of the XPS without any battery had also yielded some reboots. Both of the main batteries I had were 80%+ in state-of-health.

A replacement motherboard I purchased to get the second XPS–Precision hybrid machine working exhibited the issue when using the original XPS's CMOS battery. Since the motherboard had been sold as working, I finally decided to replace the CMOS battery. The replacement fixed the issue. I did attempt to measure the voltage of the old CMOS battery at various points, both with the machine off and with it under load. The voltages I saw were all nominal as far as I can remember, so it was surprising that the replacement worked.

Throughout the whole ordeal, I variously suspected the power adaptor, main battery, motherboard, PCH or VRM cooling, back cover, orientation of the machine, and even software. I also tried disabling C-states and SMT and in the UEFI firmware. Despite this, replacing the CMOS battery with a new one is the only solution I've found. I've now seen several months of use, with both Fedora and Windows, without any "ASF2 force off" reboots.

@o.harvey​ I have been dealing with this issue, and this is the first time I’ve heard of this solution. I’m very interested to try this and see if it works.

I have an XPS 15 9500, however I can only find a Rome Tech CMOS battery for other models, not the 9500. Will any of those work in my model?

For reference, here is the thread I created yesterday describing my issue - https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/xps-15-9500-randomly-shutting-off/65348d3eea4fe00b019c96bb

My latitude is also shutting down randomly bios also says ADF2 to along with WDT whatever that is, and this usually happens when I open my browser application, Microsoft Edge it to be exact. I had this problem before and I fixed it by removing a certain application that I had downloaded which was actually a antivirus program that turned out to be bad. I'm not really sure to do and don't know what caused it this time cuz I obviously didn't download that program again but I did what the one person said and turned off c-states and I'm  about to power back up and see what happens I guess

I was having this error i finally found how to fix it seems the cable was not working probably and i also got the error unknown power adapter so i just tried to move the wire and every thing worked well