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Precision M4300 BIOS updater version A17 is broken, and I fixed it
The BIOS version A17 updater for the Precision M4300 on Dell's web site is broken. It doesn't work either from MS-DOS or Windows.
The broken updater can be obtained via https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=hw8kt
Direct URL of the executable: https://dl.dell.com/FOLDER06318034M/1/M4300A17.exe
The problem seems to be because Dell decided to modify the file in 2020, adding an SHA256 signature to it. The updater program code doesn't work with that so clearly no-one at Dell bothered to test it.
Can someone at Dell fix that download by replacing it with the original working file?
(The earlier version A15 and A16 BIOS updaters were not modified so they still work.)
In the mean time, as a convenience to anyone reading this I have removed the SHA256 signature from the broken updater by truncating its size to 1238155 bytes. The new file works correctly in both MS-DOS and Windows.
You can get it from
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/k7ldxe5nwiebh/Fixed_Dell_Precision_M4300_A17_BIOS_updater
You can confirm with a binary compare program that the only difference between that and the broken one is the file size.
It turns out that the original working M4300A17.exe file was archived by the Wayback Machine. I have added that to the Mediafire directory above, but if you want to get it from archive.org, the URL is http://web.archive.org/web/20170704065648/https://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER01556716M/1/M4300A17.exe
I compared my truncated version of the broken EXE with the original working one. The only differences are a couple of fields in the PE header which point to the now-missing SHA256 signature data in my truncated version.
Oh, I forgot to mention before exactly how the broken updater fails. It reports an error code 0x00000504. So if you see that with any other Dell BIOS updaters, the cause may be the same as here.
DELL-Cares
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Posted August 23rd, 2021 02:00
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