Dell Bios messed up. Recovery fails. Now what?

Question

I've got a Dell xps13 which I bought new about 4 months ago. It's a "Developer Edition", so it came with Ubuntu pre-installed.

Today it suddenly didn't awake from sleep anymore. The keyboard backlight lit up, but the screen was black.

I did a hard shutdown by pressing the power button for a while and then tried to boot it again. This gave the same result: a keyboard which lights up, but a black screen.

It seemed to be warm and I had to do some other stuff so I powered it down again and let it open for about 5 hours. Then I tried booting it again, and now it gave this screen:

I tried all three options. All of them show variations of the screen below: all of them fail..

What is my next option to revive this machine? I'm in deep trouble if this machine doesn't work anymore (I've got an important day tomorrow).

Solution 1

To follow up on this for possible future readers. I contacted Dell support and they concluded my motherboard was broken. Since I turned out to have pro-support (I didn't know) they actually came to my work place and replaced the motherboard for me.

Afterwards I still had to fiddle around with the BIOS settings to get it working again though. Although I bought the device with Linux pre-installed their phone support people had no clue about it. So there's room for improvement there for Dell.

I whish all the best to future readers with the same problem..

Solution 2

You need to use another computer to go to dell.com/support. Using your Service Tag, download the BIOS for the XPS 13.

Copy the file to a FAT32 USB key and rename it to BIOS_IMG.rcv.

Plug the key into the problem computer while it is turned off and reboot. You should now have the option of recovering the BIOS from the key.

For more details see the Dell article BIOS Recovery options on a Dell PC or Tablet.
I suggest watching attentively the included video before starting.

Comments

[Ramhound]

I have bad news for you. There really isn't a next step, other than contacting Dell and likely sending the device to them. If restoring the default configuration does not work then you are simply out of luck.

[gregg]

Can you get into the BIOS, if I remember correctly the downgrade option might be disabled so you just have to enable it

[kramer65]

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded the BIOS file, but its filename is XPS_9380_1.8.0.exe. I don't have Windows installed and it never even gets to the OS anyway. Does it make any sense to rename this to BIOS_IMG.rcv and try it?

[harrymc]

Apparently the .exe needs to be unpacked. Try to open it with 7Zip, for example, to extract the BIOS file, or try executing it using WINE. Note: The video lists the Dell models that qualify. While yours seems to be included, nothing is ever sure.