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.
September 19th, 2009 at 6:07
It’s an incredible feature I can say. IT is really nice feature. I looked it’s mirror image also it looks fabulous. But ya if it remove it’s small bug that need of floppy drive then it will be more better than wright now.
September 19th, 2009 at 22:58
Does not work for me, starts to read USB then just gives up
September 23rd, 2009 at 22:42
you made my day with this post.. it really works. my bios crashed, i can’t imagine why … if you make a tutorial how to do this in windows it would be great because tonight i used a live usb ubuntu to do that… anyway..thanks man.
September 29th, 2009 at 19:22
Thanks for the guide, man!
I’m trying to recover my mini BIOS right now. It has been beeping with the screen off for more than 5 minutes now, I hope this is the normal behavior but, boy…it is soooo slow.
fingers crossed.
September 29th, 2009 at 19:30
@victor: mine bipped for no more than 2 mins, doh! Keep me informed on the process…
September 29th, 2009 at 21:51
No luck :-( after an hour stopped beeping, the pendrive’s LED was on (no blinking) and I unplugged it. the BIOS stills KO.
Dumb questions: in which USB did you plug your pendrive? it was a 2.0 or 1.1 USB pendrive?
thanks!
September 29th, 2009 at 21:59
by the way…the beep sequence it makes is 1 long + 2 beeps. (also related to a video card error code…coincidence?)
September 29th, 2009 at 23:12
@victor: usb2 pendrive in the upper left (i.e. the one nearer to the lcd screen) port.
When you hear the 1 long + 2 short beep sequence?
September 29th, 2009 at 23:58
[...] the ones that doesn't have an external floppy disk drive and can't reproduce the method described here with any pendrive (my case), I suggest to use the method described in my 4th comment (victor) in [...]
September 30th, 2009 at 0:02
wow man! I did it!! :-)
I don’t know why but the embedded BIOS flash utility didn’t recognize any of my pendrives (I tried with 5 different) in any of the ports.
In some of the tests I heard that beep sequence just when I was supposed to hear the beeps you describe in your procedure.
Anyway, I think it has nothing to do with your flashing procedure. Maybe it was the motherboard complaining about the mess.
I finally downloaded this app:
http://mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-hardware-issues-problems/8233-dell-i910-mini-vostro-a90-usb-key-drive-flashbios-utility.html
the app generates a bootable recovery floppy disk. I don’t know why but it does not work with pendrives (even if you set the drive letter to a:. Fails when writing the boot record)
So I created a virtual floppy disk drive with:
http://virtual-floppy-drive.uptodown.com/
And used the first app to create the boot recovery floppy on the virtual floppy drive. A
After that I saved the virtual floppy content to a .ima file and used it as a source to burn a bootable CD from Nero (Nero Burning Rom has an option to create boot cds from floppy drives or floppy images)
And then I recreated your procedure with an external USB DVDROM drive (I don’t have a USB floppy reader).
———–
By the way, I’ve linked this page in the mydellmini.com forums, there’s a lot of users with this problem at the forums.
I hope you don’t mind. If there’s any problem just sai it and I’ll delete de link.
Thanks again!
September 30th, 2009 at 0:02
Ooops…I forgot to paste the link from mydellmini.com
http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-hardware-issues-problems/13488-recover-bricked-damaged-bios-external-usb-cd-rom-dvd-rom.html#post106085
September 30th, 2009 at 6:28
Are you a professional journalist? You write very well.
October 14th, 2009 at 14:48
Thanks for posting.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:19
i love this feature, it bring convenient to me.
November 16th, 2009 at 18:12
I’m not familiar with dd.
so what do we copy to the usb pen drive?
is it only the a05.dd, or do we need to copy some dd files?
( I don’t understand what a dd is).
I’ve tried with just a05.dd
and my mini beeps all the time..
December 9th, 2009 at 21:06
Here is how I got it to work after failing many many times.
1. First format the USB pen drive as FAT in windows.
2. Start a Ubuntu live CD and follow this guide to make a USB. (Note if success the USB volume name will be “CRDISK.”
3. Try different USB pen drives, I have three and tried all of them. The one that worked was a kingston datatravler ready flash.
December 9th, 2009 at 21:14
Note also that I tried all USB ports on my dell mini. Right one worked. Left one near screen I think will not work.
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:38
THANK YOU!! I thought I had bricked my new Vostro A90! Attempting to flash A03, it froze. Hard reset… nothing. I knew I didn’t want the A05 that this rescue tool uses, so I copied the A03 for the VostroA90 to the pen drive after writing the boot disk image to it. It beeped forever. I copied the A04 for the Mini9 to the boot disk, booted from the right side USB port, waited about 2 minutes and it finally came up… as a Mini 9. Great! Everything is working now. Extended battery at 25% reporting 3:45 until full. Thanks again to the author!
December 23rd, 2009 at 12:29
Good post!It works for me!thanks guy!