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I have recently bought a Dell refurbished Latitude E6430s laptop.It is a gleeming like new laptop with Windows 10 newly installed and no issues showing in device manager and only the usual runtime broker DCOM error in event viewer. It works like a dream. This is a big improvement on the 3 year old **bleep** laptop I have. The last creators fall update finally wrecked it so it would not even boot properly. I just gave up and installed Linux Mint on it. Add to that **bleep** have not provided any driver or BIOS updates for Windows 10 since I upgrade it from W8.1. They will only support the factory installed OS.
I like Dell because they are still providing driver updates for W10 on a machine that had W7 factory installed.
My only problem is it has BIOS version A01 and the latest is A19. Can I update the BIOS to A19? I have read that I may have to update to an older version first.
"On some occasions you may need to install an intermediate BIOS version before updating to the latest version. This is called BIOS dependency;"
I cant find any info on this in "important information". Any ideas please?
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Posted January 15th, 2018 23:00
Try to update to A19 directly, if an intermediate version is required it will tell you to flash to it first. All BIOS Revisions are here:
http://downloads.dell.com/published/pages/latitude-e6430s.html
Once you have version A19 I would attempt a clean install of Windows 10 Version 1709:
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/download-windows-1709/
10974
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Posted January 14th, 2018 14:00
Thank you for that. I will give it a go when I am feeling brave enough.
10901
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Posted January 21st, 2018 15:00
I updated the BIOS directly to A19 and all went well "phew". I noted that W10 was installed with the BIOS in legacy mode. There is now a method of conversion to UEFI and GPT without having to re-install Windows 10.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/81502-convert-windows-10-legacy-bios-uefi-without-data-loss.html
Presumably I can do this then change the BIOS settings to UEFI?
The only problem I have is this is only possible if there are no more than 3 partitions on the HDD. I have 4 partitions. Two of those are Windows recovery partitions and I have to decide which I can delete.
10886
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Posted January 22nd, 2018 02:00
If you have a new clean install on the new HDD then its better to just clean install Windows using a UEFI Boot. Otherwise see the notes here where I played about with the MBR2GPT tool (and deleted a Dell Recovery partition):
10879
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Posted January 22nd, 2018 03:00
That is a very useful step by step guide. Thank you.
10595
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Posted April 10th, 2018 11:00
Philip - Tnx for your information and links. That helped me find the incremental BIOS files that I've tried for updating my E5430 from BIOS A09 to most current.
I've tried incremental updates and to the most current.
None of them "take" and update the BIOS, yet I don't get any error messages. All seems to be operating OK.
I'm running Windows 10 Pro, I've run the 'exe' files for the BIOS update as Administrator and from my desktop.
All with no joy.
I recently cloned the HDD to an SSD without any problems, but am wondering if that might be a hiccup, but I'm not sure how/where.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
10544
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Posted April 11th, 2018 22:00
The links were for a Latitude E6430, you are looking at a Latitude E5430 so use the UEFI BIOS updates here instead:
http://downloads.dell.com/published/pages/latitude-e5430.html
10514
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Posted April 12th, 2018 13:00
I guess I can't see what you are suggesting with respect to the UEFI version. Looking through all the BIOS files and I can't seem to put that together.
I did download an exe from that directory under BIOS to run the 5430A 18.exe file and (via Windows) it seemed it was updating, but it never completed and I'm still at Dell Inc., A09, 12/10/2012.
Still stumped.
jphughan
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10978
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Posted January 14th, 2018 12:00
If the only BIOS release you see posted is A19 and the download page doesn't say specify a particular earlier release as a pre-requisite, then yes you can go straight from A01 to A19. For systems where that's not the case, you'd see both the latest release and a particular older release available for download. Additionally, in those cases, the BIOS update would either be rolled back after it started or might even refuse to begin at all. You wouldn't be left with just a bricked system.