How to recover bios on OLD Dell

[Steven Schaefer]

I have an old Dell Optiplex 7010 that I was planning on turning into a NAS. It was working fine, however something apparently went wrong when I tried to swap out the hard drive and now it won't post. I've tried everything for a no-post situation, I've got just one stick of ram and the cpu and cooler attached, but it gets no video output. I'm quite certain that it's a corrupted BIOS, but I can't find any info on how to recover the BIOS on this generation of machine, everything on Dell's website is for machines shipped after 2015. It has two jumpers that I can see, one labeled PSWD and one labeled Service Mode, but they don't seem to help. Booting while holding Ctrl + Esc doesn't help either.

 

If anyone happens to know how to flash a new BIOS on one of these, please let me know!

[Shooterdude34]

do you see a small coincell battery on the mobo? most consumer boards will have a cr2032 coin cell battery that powers the chip that the bios info is stored on. if you remove the battery, wait a few minutes, and reinstall it, the bios settings should be wiped and whatever settings were messing it up might be fixed

[Applefreak]

23 minutes ago, Steven Schaefer said:

I have an old Dell Optiplex 7010 that I was planning on turning into a NAS. It was working fine, however something apparently went wrong when I tried to swap out the hard drive and now it won't post. I've tried everything for a no-post situation, I've got just one stick of ram and the cpu and cooler attached, but it gets no video output. I'm quite certain that it's a corrupted BIOS, but I can't find any info on how to recover the BIOS on this generation of machine, everything on Dell's website is for machines shipped after 2015. It has two jumpers that I can see, one labeled PSWD and one labeled Service Mode, but they don't seem to help. Booting while holding Ctrl + Esc doesn't help either.

 

If anyone happens to know how to flash a new BIOS on one of these, please let me know!

You can just remove the CMOS battery to reset it. Reflashing is not really a thing with DELL in general and usually not necessary. Check all your cables. Swapping the drive should not have done anything. Do you have a post speaker (beeps)? 

[Steven Schaefer]

1 hour ago, Shooterdude34 said:

do you see a small coincell battery on the mobo? most consumer boards will have a cr2032 coin cell battery that powers the chip that the bios info is stored on. if you remove the battery, wait a few minutes, and reinstall it, the bios settings should be wiped and whatever settings were messing it up might be fixed

I've reset the CMOS a bunch of times now. I've tried all combinations of removing it and holding the power button down to drain the power, powering it without the CMOS battery, etc.

 

1 hour ago, Applefreak said:

You can just remove the CMOS battery to reset it. Reflashing is not really a thing with DELL in general and usually not necessary. Check all your cables. Swapping the drive should not have done anything. Do you have a post speaker (beeps)? 

Yeah, I'm not sure what happened, but here we are. If I power the board without RAM it beeps, but I don't get any beeps otherwise.

[Steven Schaefer]

Well I was about ready to give up but I decided to try taking the mobo out of the case and for some reason that fixed it.

 

Never let em know your next move.