Latitude 5430, Smart Card not recognized in McAfee, soft reboot

Always include version of Windows in your posts.

If these PIV readers are connected via USB, you may have a USB issue. In that case, suggest you make some Power plan settings changes on just one of them as a test.

Open Device Manager. Expand list under USB. Double-click each USB entry and click its Power Management tab, if it has one. Uncheck the box "Allow PC to turn off...". Repeat for all USB entries.

Now expand list under Human Interface Devices in Device Manager and uncheck that same box for any HID entry that has a Power Management tab. Exit Device Manager when done.

Next, open the Windows Power & Sleep screen. Click Additional Power Settings. On next screen identify the active Power plan and click Change Plan Settings. On next screen, click Change Advanced Power Settings. Note: Navigation to the Advanced screen is based on Win 10 - your OS version may be somewhat different.

On the Advanced Settings screen, disable Hibernation, Hybrid Sleep, USB Selective Suspend, and PCI Express Link State Management. Save the changes to the power plan and reboot. Note: These changes will increase battery usage to some extent because PC won't be turning USB devices off to save power. 

See if this solves the problem and monitor impact on time between charges before making the changes on the other systems. If this doesn't help, you can always undo the suggested changes...

Unplug the power and let the battery drain to force shutdown - it takes around 2 hours for a fully charged battery to drop below 50% for it to shut down.

Once shut down, plug the power back in and let it charge for about 10-20mins for the battery to reach over 50% then boot the machine back up. It will then initiate the BIOS recovery.

If you can't wait for 2 hours, you'll have to unscrew the back plate to disconnect the battery.

Regards,
james

@John harper  What has any of that to do with fixing a PIV card reader problem? This problem has nothing to do with BIOS....

@RoHe We're on Windows 10 20H2 version. The issue is pre-boot so it has nothing to do with Windows drivers. FWIW, we've updated all the drivers including BIOS, we've downgraded all the drivers, we've upgraded them again, using each version available on Dell's website, also used McAfee client latest client version (7.4 currently). All to no avail.

@StingyFE  What happens if you disable McAfee (don't uninstall it, yet) so Windows Defender (aka, Windows Security) automatically gets enabled and starts running?

(Confirm Windows Defender is running after you disable McAfee and reboot PC.)

Disabling McAfee, the laptop goes to Windows login screen which we don't have a problem with. What we're unable to get our heads around is that soft rebooting the laptop gives an error from McAfee to insert smartcard then when pressing the power button and restarting the laptop, the error goes away.

@RoHe, Yes we did and still did not work.

We just got our first delivery of 7430s and they are doing the same thing.  First boot always does not recognize the internal card reader as present.  Power it off and on with the power button and on the second boot it works normally and reads the card and proceeds past the McAfee preboot.  We also verified all our BIOS settings are identical to the 7420s that work as expected.

So has your issue been resolved? We have 5420s and the BIOS setting are not exactly the same with the 5430s but close. We tried to "duplicate" the settings of the 5420 into the 5430 but it still did not work for us. Would be very interested what resolved your issue, if it was.

We just discovered this today so you're post was my first indication that we weren't alone.  We have a few Precision 7670s that we recently got that are doing the same.  Opening a case today with Dell and McAfee.  I'll be sure to post back if I get anywhere. 

For your reference, McAfee identified what might have been preventing McAfee to return the insert smart card error on soft reboot. There's a protocol in the BIOS and I'm quoting it here. It might be different in your case but worth to point it out to McAfee or Dell.

"Any efi application that is normally booted (the first boot option following the boot order) does not have access to the USB_IO_PROTOCOL with the guid {0x2B2F68D6, 0x0CD2, 0x44cf, {0x8E, 0x8B, 0xBB, 0xA2, 0x0B, 0x1B, 0x5B, 0x75 }} in this particular Dell models. This protocol is usually exposed by the system BIOS/UEFI so that EFI applications can locate this protocol to access the usb devices connected. This protocol is needed by the Drive Encryption EFI application to recognize the smartcard usb device for authenticating the user at the preboot." 

A quick update, we finally got a provisional BIOS from Dell that resolves our issue. We are now just waiting for the final version to test. 

From the last email, Dell mentioned said the ETA for the final BIOS is early March 2023.

Any chance of an update ?