A friend of mine was trying to do a recovery on a dell inspiron 531 desktop, and in doing so I'm pretty sure managed to flash and corrupt bios. I was just looking for someone to confirm this or give me another possible solution to problem. The computer will not boot or beep just powers on and idles, no video. I've read around online and most of the time the computer will beep for errors, i.e. 2 for memory and 6 for video, but this one does nothing more than power on. If this is what happened is there any way to recover from a bad flash on this motherboard or does dell have it locked down so that they are the only ones that can do the repair.
can you tell us more about the recovery he was doing? was it just software, or hardware, or both? also, many mother board have a little angled jumper thingy that can set the bios to test mode.
I've taken battery out and also set jumper to reset cmos, but didn't do any good. He said that his kids got on his computer and downloaded viruses so he used the dell recovery dvd to reinstall. He had two dvds one with windows and one with the drivers. I'm assuming the one with the drivers had a new bios on it, and him not knowing much about pc's decided to update it. He is not to clear about what he did other than being able to say that there was a box saying are you sure you want to continue, and he clicked yes. He had no idea what he was doing to start with, so there isn't much info to get out of him on what could've went wrong. I've heard about bad flash recovery built into bios, but didn't see any jumpers on mb for it. And if I could find jumper i haven't been able to find the bios anywhere but dell, and it is .exe format not .rom. If it helps the board is a ry206 model m2n61-ax.
try replugging in the video cable, inspect the cable for bent pins, if he actually went in the computer check that the ram is seated properly and video card too. sounds bad though man, might be a failure that only be remedied with a new bios chip... but im not too sure that all can be replaced easily. try googling "bad flash dell" or have him call tech support for dell if still in warranty. as for the exe, it does sound like a windows utility.
"Unfortunately for your idea of resetting CMOS, BIOS is stored on an EEPROM chip which does not need power to retain information. So resetting CMOS by interrupting power from the CMOS battery won't have any effect."- thanks djembe
It has onboard video, but I put a card in also and neither worked. I've tried ram one at a time, still no help. As for the bios chip from what I've found it is soldered in, and could possibly be replaced but not worth the time, although I have seen them sold on ebay. Another thing I've read about the dell bios chip is that they contain o.e.m. info for being able to install and activate windows without key, so I really don't want to buy something that is going to turn into a headache or possibly not work altogether. I think that it is pretty much coming down to a new MB, and I would like to find one that isn't dell, but would fit so that all of the pci and printer, monitor, etc.. line up. If anyone knows of a board that would fit I would really appreciate the advice, this MB also has to have a slot for a card reader.
I'm having the exact same problem same model number computer and everything on my father's machine. I think a new motherboard also, have you had any luck finding one that will fit?
Donald you can find the dell motherboards on ebay pretty cheap around 70 dollars, I didn't bother looking for aftermarket ones anymore because the people I was working on it for contacted dell and dell said that they would warranty it although it had been out about 2 months already.
