[German]Any of you with more recent Dell notebooks or desktop systems? Then you might want to be a little cautious with recent BIOS (UEFI) updates and read this post beforehand. There is evidence that a BIOS update from Dell can prevent notebooks or desktop systems from booting. Affected are Dell Latitude notebooks (5320 and 5520), as well as the Dell Inspiron 5680 and the Alienware Aurora R8 desktops. Here is a rough overview of what is known.
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Dell seems to have recently released a BIOS update for its Dell Latitude notebooks (5320 and 5520), the Dell Inspiron 5680 and the Alienware Aurora R8 desktops (the announcement on Dell's site has already been deleted). Those who install these updates struggle with Windows BlueScreens and boot problems afterwards.
Some forum posts indicates trouble
In the Dell forum, for example, there are several posts of affected people, like here and here. One affected person describes his experiences after a BIOS update to version 1.14.3 on a Dell Latitude 5320 system:
Latitude 5320 System BIOS Update 1.14.3 Blue Screen & Booting Issues
After upgrading my 5320's BIOS to the new 1.14.3 version today, the laptop will not boot. When pressing the power button, the light on the button will show for around 10 seconds and then turn off again. Occasionally the whole keyboard lights up but the laptop will shutdown shortly after, but sometimes the laptop will turn on and display a "Time-of-day not set – please run SETUP program" error, and upon pressing "Continue", the laptop will then shutdown again. A few times it has booted but then shown a blue screen for a while before shutting down.
Should I downgrade my BIOS by using an external USB, or should I do something else e.g. BIOS recovery?
There are several affected people who confirm the problem – and one user describes how he was able to downgrade the machine. Dell has published this post on BIOS recovery about it. For a Dell Aurora R8 desktop, there is this thread on Dell's forum.
Aurora R8, BSOD loop, can't recover Dell Recovery disk or Ubuntu USB boot
My Aurora R8 completely hard freeze crashed yesterday while I was playing VR. It automatically rebooted but is stuck in an endless Preparing Automatic repair and then BSOD loop with a sad face and incomplete text.
I tried everything
I can't go into recovery mode, it just gives me a BSOD
created a Dell Recovery USB and that still gave me a BSOD
created a Ubuntu USB boot stick, stuck in a black screen
It really unfortunate to have computer problems in the holidays. It kind of sounds like my Main SSD just completely died, but I'm not sure. Any ideas?
The colleagues from Bleeping Computer have dug up the two posts here about the Latitude 5320 and here about the Inspiron 5680 on reddit.com. The affected person here writes that he received a request to install a critical update, presumably from SupportAssist. After that, the system died with a black screen. But there the problem could be brought back to life by a reboot and a disk repair by the operating system. Meanwhile, there is this warning on reddit.com not to try a BIOS update to version 1.14.3 for the Dell Latitude 5320. These are isolated cases, but it does suggest a problem with the BIOS upgrade (especially since Dell seems to have removed that upgrade). Any of you affected? And if so, could this be fixed with a BIOS downgrade?
I don't recomending downgrade 1.13.0 or 1.12.0, because I tried on 1st notebook downgrade to 1.13.0 and 2nd to 1.12.0, both Latitude 5520 died. Disconnect batery or other advices from Dell forum not helped. Service arived and replaced mainboards. Lates information form services is that spare parts mainboards for Latitude 5520 missing. Yesterday was wrong BIOS still on support page, today is gone. I recomending other client during boot just click Continue and wait for fix from Dell.