I, unfortunately, installed the wrong system firmware. I did not know at the time.
I then restarted my computer and my BIOS beeped at me 10 times then turned off and on in an endless loop. I had to disconnect it from power. Every time I attempted to turn on my PC, it did that endless loop. I couldn’t get into the BIOS nor did I see any video feedback. My keyboard or mouse never lit up, but my tower did for a brief second each loop.
That software update bricked my motherboard. I took out the CMOS battery and reset my CMOS with the jumper plug. After doing so, the endless loop was gone and my PC turned on and the tower and keyboard lit up, but the mouse did not; I still did not get any video feedback.
So, I had to buy a programmer and test clip to flash my BIOS directly on the BIOS chip. After I did this, I got video feedback and was able to enter the BIOS, but it could not read a boot drive. So, I changed it from Legacy to UEFI (what it was before the hiccup [GPT partitioned SSD]), saved it, then restarted. My BIOS beeped at me 10 times again and went on the endless on and off loop again.
I then replaced my CMOS battery with a new one and it booted right up and found my boot drive automatically.
However, I saw the system firmware update that caused the issue still in Device Manager. It is giving a Code 10.
I then went to the Dell Support site and downloaded the updated BIOS version for my PC. The installation wizard said my current BIOS and the new BIOS are the same versions. I installed it anyway. The system firmware that caused the issue was still there and in the same state as before.
I am going to flash my BIOS again to A14, but, this time, I am going to do it via the one-time boot menu (F12) and with the BIOS A14 BIN file extracted from the Dell Alienware BIOS exe file.
I am doing this because I am having a longer POST and Windows startup than before, and Windows updates along with an incorrect system firmware that a normal BIOS update will not fix. I am then going to do a clean Windows installation right after I update my BIOS.
I have been doing a bunch of research on how to use the A14 BIOS BIN file extracted from the Alienware BIOS exe file from the Dell Support site as the file I can update my BIOS with. I am not very confident so I would love to hear someone who has more knowledge on this.
EDIT: I have found out that I am using an AMI BIOS thanks to erpster5z in the reply.
I could use flashrom to load onto a boot USB along with my BIN file and it will flash my BIOS.
My Questions:
1. Can anyone confirm if my BIOS chip has been successful in flashing with flashrom or some other software?
Here are the contents of the exe file someone kindly extracted for me:
Thank you for the reply, I appreciate it. That makes sense, thank you! It answers my question. I will try to use flashrom instead. Flashrom doesn’t have my BIOS chip listed but I can try to see if their software is compatible by going through with the flash.
I used his YT and website tutorial to fix mine and it worked like a charm. I could definitely ask if he knows of a program that can flash my BIN file to my BIOS to my chip.
EDIT: I actually do not need to use flashrom, correct? Since it already has the AFUWIN64.exe, I just need to format the USB then load all of those files onto the USB and boot from it, correct? Or is there something else I need to do?
It’s unclear what really did happen here. You possibly flashed a wrong bios, reprogrammed it with programmer, but get the same symptoms again, this time because of wrong boot settings (legacy vs. UEFI)?
- Those vendor specific flash programs normally do not write the complete bios image, they spare some regions.
- You didin’t make a backup of your bricked bios before reprogramming, did you? So your serial, service tag might be lost?
- The firmware in device manager is a link to a bios/ bios update. In your case it’s connected to oem32.inf, which I assume is the inf file for a windows bios update, that possibly never happened. This is menat for updating firmware via Windows update.
Please do yourself a favour and dump the firmware which now is installed, attach it here or post a link and lets have a look into it to find out what really is installed right now!
Now thinking on it, I very well could have flashed the wrong BIOS. Yes, it would not recognize my boot device so I went into BIOS and changed it from Legacy to UEFI since my boot drive is a GPT partition. The BIOS then beeped again 10 times and went back into the on and off loop. I changed out the CMOS battery with a new one and then my PC booted from my SSD no problem.
I do get a Windows blue screen error every now and again right when it boots Windows. The BIOS alien I see when it is booting up is completely different.
- I had no idea. I wonder why they spare some regions.
- I made a backup of what was on my BIOS before I reprogrammed it but it kept failing for some reason and now it’s just a crdownload file. I would attach it here but it’s 4GB and zipping it would not compress it enough. I have it uploaded to mega to download but I cannot add any links (completely understandable). And that’s actually crazy, my service tag is lost. I found that out yesterday. Dell support site cannot identify my PC and Dell Support Assist (DSA) has a completely different service tag than what is listed on my products vis Dell. There is always an error when trying to log in with my Dell account via DSA.
- That is interesting.
I have attached the BIN file I used when reprogramming my BIOS chip. I do want to note that I downloaded the BIOS update exe file from Dell and went through with the update even though the installation wizard told me the BIOS version was the same.
I’m interested in what the current (dumped) content of your bios chip is, not the Dell stock firmware file.
Yep, that’s the reason why vendor specific flash programs spare some regions- these regions contain your machine specific data and the settings (NVRAM), thats absolutely meaningful. That’s the reason why your serial and service tag are lost now since a stock bios does have empty areas where your original bios used to have this information. Since you programmed the complete 16 MB with an ‘anonymous’ stock bios this information is overwritten now.
How did you manage to get a 4 GB file out of a bios dump of 16 MBte?
You can post links if you don’t let them look like links, some spaces do the job.
Sorry about that. That was the file I used to recover my PC. Do you recommend a particular way to dump the contents of my BIOS chip? I saw this post by LOST_N_BIOS - win-raid. com/t6518f16-Help-How-to-dump-bios-to-file.html
I am working right now but I will definitely get back to you on the BIOS chip. Thanks again for the help.
I honestly have no idea, I was wondering the same thing. I had the programmer attached to the BIOS chip. I then had it read my chip; it took a couple of minutes. I then saved it and it failed each time and the file size was 4GB.
EDIT 2: I found the backup BIOS file and I have attached it here. Sorry for overlooking it.
EDIT: I was actually able to open the crdownload file with the HxD program. I am not 100% sure if what I am looking at has some, most, or all of the BIOS backup file or not but it has a bunch of binary code residing in it. I saw this decoded text:"QCD-ROM not bootable on this system.Remove CD-ROM and press ENTER key to continue". It is insanely large. Not sure where that programmer pulled all of that information from.
Attached is the BIN file I extracted from my BIOS chip. Hopefully, that is what you are looking for. I extracted it as a rom file as well; both files are included. Let me know if you need anything else!
EDIT: I used the Universal BIOS Backup Toolkit 2.0. Let me know if that is an issue.
In that post I mentioned (LOST_N_BIOS instructions), I did the commands then saved the memory dump (attached). EDIT: The first BIN file I attached using the Universal BIOS Backup Toolkit 2.0 looks the same as the FPT Op besides the entry.
— Flash Devices Found — MX25L12805D ID:0xC22018 Size: 16384KB (131072Kb)
PDR Region does not exist. GBE Region does not exist.
- Reading Flash [0x1000000] 8192KB of 8192KB - 100% complete. - Verifying Flash [0x1000000] 8192KB of 8192KB - 100% complete. RESULT: The data is identical.
FPT Operation Passed
When I looked at the BIOS chip (took a picture of it) it shows a different chip than what CMD shows. I wonder why that is. EDIT: That was the file the person used who wrote the tutorial. He did not know what BIOS chip is was so he chose the first on the list. I assume it was configured with that BIOS chip.
Are you sure this is the file the programmer tried to create?
Thanks for the dump of the bios region, well done. (I think the toolkit uses basically intel tools, too, but contains more versions to cover more firmwares) I can confirm that the bios is on a14, there’s no difference in the static parts, NVRAM (settings is often just one with the default values in stock bios, it gets rebuild automatically and a second NVRAM is often added. Pic shows your bios region on the left, stock firmware on the right. NVRAM and possibly first padding won’t get overwritten under a normal update, the two EFI volumes and the padding between them are static and 100% identical to the Dell stock bios. So there’s no need for further tries to update the bios region for now.
Well, thanks for the info, machine specific information is in NVRAM, in padding there’s just a Windows license code. But: static parts of your bios region are 100% identical to a stock A14 bios, 100% the same as your current bios region. Difference is padding and NVRAM.
You may check yourself- open the backup of the ‘bricked’ bios in HxD, open the stock bios in Hxd, Ctrl K compares the files, go to the end of both files, and compare backwards with Shift-F6- first difference is Windows code and then NVRAM… (0x880030 for the complete firmware or 0x80030 for just the bios region)
So you possibly never did flash a wrong bios? If this really is the backup of the bricked bios you were already on A14 and never flashed somthing else…
That is interesting. Is it possible to recover the NVRAM and other information then flash it to my BIOS when I do a clean Windows install?
I was doing a data comparison before you posted and I saw a lot of differences at the top (assume it’s padding) but I really don’t know what I am looking at like you do. I would love to gain that knowledge though. It seems hard to find so far. I will look into that UEFI software you have. I saw it somewhere in one of the downloads I did but it’s on my Alienware.
So I followed the instructions here - www. tachytelic. net/2021/06/repair-dell-alienware-area-51-r2-corrupt-bios/ and downloaded the provided Dell BIOS file. I thought it was A13 since that is the only previous BIOS version for Alienware Area-51 R2—or at least under my service tag. Apparently, it was BIOS A14. I am not sure where Paul, the author, got that stock BIN file. Someone on Tom’s Hardware extracted the BIN file from the exe file provided by Dell Drivers and Downloads section under my service tag. Here is that download - dl. dell. com/FOLDER05163565M/1/Alienware_Area_51_R2_A14.exe which I will attach to this post.
Well, I never flashed my BIOS when I bricked my motherboard. It was a software program that installed a system firmware update, which I no longer have nor will I ever have a program like that again. When the installation was finished, I restarted my PC and it beeped 10 times and proceeded in an on and off loop. I then removed the CMOS battery and placed the jumper plug on pins 1 and 2 then back on 2 and 3. It no longer turned on and off in an endless loop. It just turned on and gave no video feedback. That is when I Googled and found Paul’s post. When I completed the flashing with the programmer, it turned on and I went into BIOS to change the boot mode to UEFI (like I had it previously) and it beeped 10 times again and went into that endless loop. I ended up having to replace the CMOS battery with a new one and it booted up in UEFI mode to my NVMe SSD.
I still see the system firmware in the device manager that started it all. It gives a code 10. I am not sure what is supposed to be there or what to do with it so I was going to flash the A14 BIOS again (attached file) then restore my BIOS to default settings and change everything to full UEFI as I had it before. Then, I was going to delete all partitions on my SSD boot drive and create a GPT partition again and do a clean Windows 10 install and, hopefully, it will fix the issues I am having. I see a different alien when BIOS loads. I think it was the same one when I had the stock Toshiba HDD as my boot drive.
Please post the content of c:\windows\inf\oem32.inf (in a spoiler- the eye- symbol) of attach the inf- file zipped.
Those bios files get extracted to the admin accounts temp folder, so you find the files under c:\users<admin accounts name>\appdata\temp in a folder with random name, search for the youngest folder…
Might be possible to restore that information, yes, I’ll have a closer look into that later.
The temp folder gets cleared by my antivirus every day. I also will clear it. Unless you are talking about a different temp folder? I use Windows Run (Windows+R) and type %temp% to get to that folder. Is this the same one? If it is, I am just going to have to wait until it shows up. In the future, I think I will save the contents of that folder on my external HDD.
Thank you for looking into that! I appreciate it. Don’t go too crazy, I already feel bad (but very grateful) you’ve helped out this much. I wish I found this forum sooner. I have never seen so much knowledge in any other forum out there. I have friends who custom-build their PCs or are just PC/gaming enthusiasts and I told them about this forum.
I did the memory dump for the other firmware regions and attached the BIN file.
Why? You didn’t write anything, just read the firmware and wrote it into a new file, that doesn’t hurt.
Regarding temp folder: Dell unpacks the update package there while the program is running and deletes the files after the program is finished, so you have to search this place while the program waits for input. If you close it again, the files will be deleted again.
As far as I can see you never flashed somthing into your firmware. I thinkthat this update trial did reset your ‘CMOS’ so that the system tried to boot legacy, no more than that. Question is how to restore the machine specific data, but that’s not a problem, there are just different ways.
Did you allow any system updater to work on your system? Did you install any program that could execute updates without asking? This update process looks very much like Windows update trying to install a (wrong) bios update which happily didn’t work at least regarding the firmware.There should/could be a bios setting for disabling bios update through Windows.
Now I’m personally interested a little how MS is doing this and in addition how to remove this update package again- remember, that’s just a file sitting somwhere, it’s not in your own firmware!
- Could you have a look into your windows directory if there’s a folder ‘Firmware{7039436b-6acf-433b-86a1-368ec2ef7e1f}’
- Could you search your registry for the expression FirmwareFilename
- Could you search your registry for the GUID 7039436b-6acf-433b-86a1-368ec2ef7e1f
You said to be careful with the write command (fptw -f) because it doesn’t do any other checks. However, I did not write anything so I was just being paranoid. PTSD.
I allowed a system updater called "Driver Booster 9 Pro". It popped up an alert stating I need to update my extremely outdated system firmware from 2007 I believe. I came across someone else who had the same issue so it might have been a bug on their end. I had Driver Booster for 11 months with no issues until that point.
- There is a file name like that here (I actually found it and zipped it when I was looking at the INF file) - C:\Windows\Firmware (BIN file attached). - I did a search for FirmwareFilename and found it:
- I did a search for GUID 7039436b-6acf-433b-86a1-368ec2ef7e1f and found a bunch of that ID all throughout the registry. I checked HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall and could not find that ID. Is there somewhere specific you would like me to look?
EDIT: I did find one that I think may be useful in the photo below. Both locations I list in the next sentence are the same as the photo below. I found it here - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\UEFI\RES_{7039436b-6acf-433b-86a1-368ec2ef7e1f}\0 and here - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\UEFI\RES_{7039436b-6acf-433b-86a1-368ec2ef7e1f}\0 [[File:GUID 7039436B-6ACF-433B-86A1-368EC2EF7E1F (1).jpg|none|auto]]
The oem32.inf file also has a PNF file; just in case you would like to take a look at that I attached the file.
So you are saying I did not brick my motherboard or that I could have gotten around reprogramming my BIOS? I just cannot make sense of me not getting any video feedback at all until I reprogrammed my BIOS. I guess the only thing I could make sense of it is replacing my CMOS battery before I reprogrammed my BIOS and maybe then could I have gotten back into my BIOS. I assume that attempted firmware update fried my CMOS battery? If this is the case I am pretty upset about what I did. I seriously wish I found this forum before I committed to reprogramming my BIOS. However, this is a great learning experience but I wish I didn’t have to learn from my mistakes.
Merry Christmas to you too! It’s actually my birthday as well, which is nice since not all the attention is on me lol
A Dell Vostro 14-5459 070B SKYBAY QA09 Bios 5.11 12-02-2016 on that firmware.zip file… humm how about that!!! Im the same opinion as lfb6… nothing was initialy flashed… some cmd/tool just jammed the system and maybe indeed u didnt need the SPI programmer. Re-install the damm machine with a clean OS installation again and leave 3rd party tools/drivers away from u, my opinion only, cheers. Oh bay the way, happy anniversary and Merry Christmas, to both of u.
Have you ever watched the TV show, Doc Martin (great show)? You literally remind me of Doc Martin, it’s hilarious. If you haven’t, look it up and check it out.
HAHA "humm how about that". Damn, that is seriously unfortunate. I should have just replaced the CMOS battery first. Hindsight is fun.
I plan on doing a clean installation and those 3rd party tools are definitely a thing of the past.
Seems like they used a very ‘unspecific’ hardware identifier/ GUID- if you search in the Microsoft Update Catalog you’ll find a lot of hardware with that GUID…
And this wasn’t Driver Booster 9 Pro, it might have triggered the process, and it might have taken this update from ‘somewhere’ (I can’t find it any longer in the Microsoft catalogue), but this is Windows update doing this job. It’s MS’ goal to do firmware updates via Window update. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows…-windows-update
I’d try the following:
Use the attached bios region and flash it with the command you already used in #9. But I’d recommend to do it this time via Dos (USB boot stick) or in a efi- shell since Windows writes ‘always’ to the NVRAM, that might interefere with the update of this region.
Command: fpt -bios -f a14persbiosreg.bin
When the writing is finished successfully, switch off the system, clear cmos, start again, go directly into bios, load standard defaults, check/ choose correct boot mode. Check if your service tag and serial is there. Don’t boot into Windows!
Dump the bios again in Dos or an EFI shell Command: fpt -bios -d newbiosreg.bin, post the file.
This is a little bit of trying, the machine specific Dell- variables would not be created as the first entries in NVRAM store normally, so there’s a chance that some entries have to be in a defined sequence. So maybe these entries get overwritten when repopulating the NVRAM, but I don’t think so… We might need a second try, but I don’t suspect bricking your machine again ( but there’s no 100%…)
(When the bios information is complete again, I’d like to try to get rid of this firmware in device manager, so please wait a second before you do a fresh Windows install…)
