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Dell Vostro 5581 Service Manual

Diagnostic LED

This section details the diagnostic features of the battery LED in a notebook.

Instead of beep codes errors are indicated via the bicolor Battery Charge LED. A specific blink pattern is followed by flashing a pattern of flashes in amber, followed by white. The pattern then repeats.

NOTE: The diagnostic pattern will consist of a two digit number being represented by a first group of LED blinks (1 through 9) in amber, followed by a 1.5 second pause with the LED off, and then a second group of LED blinks (1 through 9) in white. This is then followed by a three second pause, with the LED off, before repeating over again. Each LED blink takes 0.5 seconds.

The system will not shutdown when displaying the Diagnostic Error Codes. Diagnostic Error Codes will always supersede any other use of the LED. For instance, on Notebooks, battery codes for Low Battery or Battery Failure situations will not be displayed when Diagnostic Error Codes are being displayed:

Table 1. LED pattern. The table describes the LED pattern that will allow you to identify the issues.
Blinking pattern		Problem Description	Suggested Resolution
Amber	White
2	1	processor	processor failure
2	2	system board, BIOS ROM	system board, covers BIOS corruption or ROM error
2	3	memory	no memory/no RAM detected
2	4	memory	memory failure/RAM failure
2	5	memory	invalid memory installed
2	6	system board; chipset	system board/ chipset error
2	7	display	display failure
3	1	RTC power failure	coin-cell battery failure
3	2	PCI/Video	PCI/Video card/chip failure
3	3	BIOS recovery 1	recovery image nor found
3	4	BIOS recovery 2	recovery image found but invalid