Comments on: Dell Mini 9 USB pendrive recovery from failed BIOS flash

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 04:57:49 +0000

Well this isn’t working for me. I tried every usb port with no luck. After, holding fn+B then power the mini beeps once the pen drive led flashes once and that it… Screen stays blank and no other beeps. Any help would be appreciated.

By: EBIOS read error

EBIOS read error — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:51:51 +0000

By: Raymond

Raymond — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:41:17 +0000

Hello,

I have a problem. My DELL Mini 9 does not start up. When I press the power button absolutely nothing happens. I tried to do the USB thing. It beeps once when I press the Fn & B keys and attach the power adapter, but my usb does not flash and still nothing happens. Anyone knows how to fix this? Thanks

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:26:35 +0000

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!

I could finally revive my Dell Mini with this method. Be careful if you want to upgrade to A06 instead of A05, because simply overwriting the file WILL NOT WORK!!

The files must be present in the floppy drive in a very specific order. If you want to directly upgrade to A06 you will have to follow this guide:

http://web.telia.com/~u43311424/crisis-recovery-disk/

Kind regards.

By: Matty

Matty — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:29:45 +0000

Good post!It works for me!thanks guy!

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:38:12 +0000

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!

By: Ib

Ib — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:14:20 +0000

Note also that I tried all USB ports on my dell mini. Right one worked. Left one near screen I think will not work.

By: Ib

Ib — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:06:36 +0000

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:12:53 +0000

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..

By: Rebecca chan

Rebecca chan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:19:45 +0000

i love this feature, it bring convenient to me.

By: Poly

Poly — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:48:41 +0000

Thanks for posting.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:28:30 +0000

Are you a professional journalist? You write very well.

By: victor

victor — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:02:56 +0000

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

By: victor

victor — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:02:06 +0000

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!

By: Recover bricked/damaged BIOS with an external USB CD-ROM/DVD-ROM

Recover bricked/damaged BIOS with an external USB CD-ROM/DVD-ROM — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:58:32 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: fosk

fosk — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:12:31 +0000

@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?

By: victor

victor — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:59:16 +0000

by the way…the beep sequence it makes is 1 long + 2 beeps. (also related to a video card error code…coincidence?)

By: victor

victor — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:51:59 +0000

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!

By: fosk

fosk — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:30:43 +0000

@victor: mine bipped for no more than 2 mins, doh! Keep me informed on the process…

By: victor

victor — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:22:14 +0000

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.

By: daniel

daniel — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:42:09 +0000

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.

By: Bren

Bren — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 21:58:30 +0000

Does not work for me, starts to read USB then just gives up

By: reisezubehor

reisezubehor — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:07:05 +0000

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.