Dell Latitude BIOS Update with No Battery

_Luke_ · January 8

I bought a faulty Dell Latitude E5570 a few days ago... The fault was just that it would only work when plugged in so thought it would be a relatively simple fix, a new battery.

Now I was looking at some 3rd party ones on Amazon but looking at reviews found them to not always work due to Dell checking that batteries are genuine parts and if not refusing to charge them. I therefore (as I didn't want to spend the crazy amounts of a new genuine battery but still want a battery) bought a slightly smaller capacity battery from eBay. Note, this 'new' battery is said to be compatible with this laptop on both the listing and having searched it and it is a genuine Dell battery so I saw no reason not to go for it considering the cost saving.

Well I installed it in the laptop today and was greeted by it showing as 1 percent in Windows, which I noticed didn't appear to be increasing. As you've likely guessed by this point, when I looked in the BIOS it was saying it wasn't a genuine Dell battery.

So after some research I came to the conclusion that prehaps this BIOS is too old to reconginise this battery, so went to Dell's website, searched the service tag and sure enough found it needed a BIOS update.

So I downloaded the new BIOS and was greeted with an error saying that the battery needs to be above 10 percent for it to do... Little more research found that I could do it via cmd by running as administrator, typing the name of the file and then /forceit. At this point I then confirmed the actions on the pop ups and thought it was going to update, well it restarted, didn't update and just went stright to windows. Tried this a few times and same result.

Well worth noticing as it was restarting it kept getting to the screen that the image shows, so I presumed the battery was causing the issue. I then removed the battery and tried again with the method via cmd, this time it just went stright into Win.

So I then copied the bios exe file onto a spare USB and tried using the bios update option via the boot selector. This said inadequate for the power, which Im guessing is due to the battery. Google revealed little info about how to overcome this so I just tried to type the /forceit command in the options box and to my surprise the button to update them let me press it and the power thing had changed from inadequate in red to the word forced in green. Finally thought it would work but once again it just boots into Windows and doesn't update the BIOS.

I don't understand why it's made so complicated to update the BIOS. I understand a warning about low battery or no battery but at the end of the day what's the different between been just plugged in on a laptop and using a desktop computer which I'm sure would let you update the BIOS fine.

Specs: Dell Latitude E5570 with a core i5 6th Gen processor, 8gb RAM, 256gb SSD, Win 10 Pro.

TL;DR want to update the BIOS on a Dell Latitude E5570 without a battery. Tried a variety of methods but cannot get it to update.