Same issue here and with the Bios UIFI pending issue alot of us are going to need to upgrade.

Today the a Dell technician installed a new mainboard with BIOS version 1.8.0. Sadly it also can't be updated to a higher version than 1.9.1.

The only way I found to effectively upgrade the bios on these is pressing f12 during boot up.  In there select over the air upgrade.  Make sure you have a network cable or wireless available you can easily connect to.  Continue down the over the air bios update wizard.  If prompt connect to network. Ensure laptop is plugged in.  Finish the update.  I did have some luck with the forceit switch, but still was hit and miss on weather a machine actually updated. Also it seems to sometimes break wifi.  I have had to shut off memory integrity to get driver working.  I have also had to revert the driver back in some cases.  Mainly removing the hardware from hardware manage, selecting the uninstall driver.  Making sure wireless is disables or driver will not be removed if it is in use.  After rebooting I went into device manager and found wifi controller with a bang.  I downloaded the older driver from Dell.  Extracted it then went into device manager and updated the driver selecting the folder I extracted the files to.  Or you can turn of uefi boot off as that resolves the issue.  

@BIverson​ In which way is your answer related to the issue in this thread? The issue is: An Update from any BIOS-version lower and including 1.9.1 to any BIOS-version 1.10.0 and higher isn't working on some Precision 5690 notebooks, independent of the method you are using for the update. Also nothing to do with any drivers...

@as_string​ If you read the first sentence it obviously states that the only way I could get my bios to upgede is to do an over the air upgrade.  I didnt include bios numbers because i have done this on over 30 computers and they all had issues.  They were all 5690s. The rest of the statements is a path any user may have to follow if they decide to do a over the air upgrade of the bios upgrade breaks their wifi driver.  

Finally I was able to resolve the issue with assistance from the Dell support.

They suggested to boot from an Ubuntu live USB stick und use fwupd.

So I typed in a bunch of fwupdmgr commands but at some point I got an error message saying:

"WARNING: UEFI capsule updates not available or enabled in firmware See https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/wiki/PluginFlag:capsules-unsupported for more information."

I checked my BIOS settings und in the "Update" section I actually found an option saying something about this capsule update and it had been deactivated (I'm pretty sure it is also the default value).

After changing this to "yes" and booting into Ubuntu again, I got a different message saying the partition is full, at least 51,4MB needed but only about 19MB had been left or so.

This is about the EFI/SYSTEM partition which is only 100MB in size on my Notebook. It seems there is also a rescue system from dell in that partition and also some stuff from Windows, so there wasn't hardly any space left.

I then proceeded to delete more or less randomly several bigger files from this partition until I had enough space needed for the update.

After that fwupdmgr update (after doing an fwupdmgr refresh and an fwupdmgr get-updates) prepared the BIOS updated and after rebooting the notebook the installation started and after another reboot completed successfully.

Hi

This may already be what you have tried, IFSO  Sorry, ELSE Hope this helps...

@anne_droid​ Thanks for the Info. The BIOS on my pc was not upgraded but it still boots. Do you mean I can update BIOS using the recovering procedure? It says .rcv file is only for BIOS recovery when the system won't boot.

@LarryLDell​ 

@anne_droid​ The 1.13 BIOS update file has the correct hash. I verified it following your instruction. However, running the update file to upgrade BIOS still fails with the same error.

Is "BIOS recovery" my only choice now? It does not seem to say bootable USB. Is it safe to recover BIOS to a different (higher) version? Thank you for your help!