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Cannot navigate in bios. Please help
After flashing bios to A013 on inspiron 8000 I cannot move around in set up to change settings. I press f2 when the dell screen appears. I get the first page of set up, but it is incomplete. No recognition of the hard drive, the internal cd/rw, or the floppy. No read of my sevice tag. None of the arrows work. altP does not change pages. Esc does nothing. My solution is to press off. On reboot, I have no trouble getting into XP pro, my computer sees all of my drives, etc, and it seems to work normally. But if I reboot and try to enter setup, again, I have the same setup problems. Has this happened to anyone? How might I fix it? I'm happy to reinstall the OS (I just upgraded, anyway), but I worry that this is a bios problem, not XP pro. Please advise. It's making me crazy. Thanks. Olivia
I had a similar problem with an 8000 with A02. It would boot to the BIOS opening screen and showed all drives present, but DOS showed no bootable devices and it would not boot the Harddrive like yours. The board I have has a socketed BIOS chip, so I popped it out with a chip Puller and substituted a Spare BIOS Chip with A23. Normal operation resulted across the board. So I put in a BIOS Flash Floppy and booted the board to the screen where you answer yes to flash the BIOS with A23. I stopped without powering down, and removed the good BIOS Chip with heavy wooden toothpicks, substituted the corrupt chip and pressed "Y". A normal flash to A23 resulted and normal ops from that chip thereafter. I did this to another chip with the same symptoms and version with the same results.
Whether this is possible with your Board/Chip would depend on whether the chip is socketed or soldered.
- Thank you for your excellent advice. I was able to flash to A23, and IT ALL WORKS NOW! I had not raised to A23 because of advice on this board to avoid unless necessary. It was necessary, as you suggested. BTW, I am dazzled by leduke30's ingenuity. Fortunately, I did not need to trade out chips, but the technique is very interesting, and should help other readers. Again, Thanks all. Olivia
Livjones
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Posted March 24th, 2005 21:00