Sep 16
After a bad BIOS flash (or better, a flash of a bad BIOS, ghgh) on my Dell Mini 9 I started searching for a recovery procedure using Phoenix BIOS Crisis Recovery Disk.
But this tool requires an USB floppy drive, as seen on Mydellmini forum. Being this hardware quite hem… legacy+unuseful I managed to create a USB pen drive image that will restore the netbook with the very latest A05 BIOS.
- Download the USB pen drive image here and unzip the file.
- Copy the A05.DD image to your usb pen, using dd on linux:
dd if=A05.DD of=/dev/sdX
replace X with your correct device, of course. Haven’t tried, but this may work also with dd for windows.
Then start the recovery procedure:
- Remove battery and power adapter;
- Confirm USB pen drive is plugged in;
- While pressing and holding Fn & B keys, attach power adapter plug. The power lights will momentarily blink and your Mini will beep once;
- Continue to hold Fn & B and press the power button;
- Release the keys once USB pen drive begins reading (your pendrive led starts blinking);
- Your Mini will beep continually until the flash is completed and reboots.
Note: the display is not available during this process.






The link doesn’t work anymore.
I have a bricked DELL MINI 1011 beeping 1 long and 2 short beeps when boot up.
I need to find the USB drive image.
Any other link to look at?
@milupas: here’s the new download link: http://bit.fosk.it/dellA05bios
I need help with a mini 9 running xp, the fn+B without a flash drive produces beeps but I dont understand on how to make the recovery flash drive
i have a dell 1749 with i3. it locked up during bios update. (yes i let it sit for about an hour) im trying to find the bios recovery files. phoenix a08 if anyone can point me in the right direction. it would be greatly appreciated.
i also have a 1,2 beep code.
hello…i have the file in the folder document.what must i type in order dd to write to my usb flash which the pc recognizes as CORSAIR?i am not falimiar with command dd!Thanks!
Awesome, the Mini was headed for the trash. Thanks!!!
Just wanted to add my voice in saying great blog.
Anyway, I have a Dell Mini 1011, works fantastic and have never had a problem
Thanks for the guide, it got me out of trouble! For a while there I thought it was bricked and only good for a door stop.
This is an article I’ve seen one of the most exciting , its content is very rich , rich in a lot of philosophy of life , giving the knowledge about the many interesting and helpful information . Thank you for sharing . Look forward to your updates.
Hi,I was performing a BIOS update on Dell Inspiron N5010(using Win7 64bit) to Latest bios version A12 when the
laptop became inactive plus the fan started to run at full speed. i could not even switch off the machine by pressing the power button. At the end i had to pull out AC cord and BAttery.Now the its dead
(No activity at all).
After searching around i found that there is some bios recovery solution.
I don’t want to create more mess.
Plz Help.
the process worked for me only when i formatted the USB stick to FAT32 in windows then applied the dd commands in linux. A 4Gig cruzer USB stick did not work but a smaller Kingston data traveler did the trick. If you are getting the 1 long beep + 2 short then that isn’t going to work. the beeps should last <2 mins like fosk says and it's a bunch of short beeps.
I also had no issues w/ the A05.DD file. for me it was finding a USB stick that worked.
IT WORKED!
thank you Chalala,
after many trials i found out i need a usb flash drive no bigger than 2gb, then i used chalala’s program. i have windows 7 and had to right click WINCRIS.exe and change compatability to windows xp sp3 and then the program would open no problem after plugging in usb drive. after program finished creating drive, helf FN+B then plugged in power and turned on and it kept beeping away until booted right up normally! thank you again chanala i spent hours trying to fix this and even use windows dd service which did not help at all.
THANK YOU SO MUCHHHh!!! IT WORKED LIKE MAGIC :))))
SO I USED CHALALA’S WINCRISIS AND THEN PERFORMED THE PROCEDURE BY FOSK.
SAVED MY DAY. LOVE YA GUYSSSS
thank you guys!!! This worked like magic :)
So I used chalala’s wincrisis to make a bootable usb and then performed fosk’s procedure with the keys and such.
A couple of beeps.. silence…beeps.. andd tadaahhhhh the screen showed up .
I love yaa guys
thank You, my Dell mini is saved from trash.
THANKS.
Hello I am so happy I found your webpage, I really found you by error, while I was searching on Bing for something else, Nonetheless I am here now and would just like to say kudos for a marvelous post and a all round interesting blog (I also love the theme/design), I don’t have time to browse it all at the moment but I have bookmarked it and also added in your RSS feeds, so when I have time I will be back to read a great deal more, Please do keep up the awesome job.