TommydCat

Pretty sure the filename is right, and a Dell tech talked me through the CMOS reset. But I'm sitting here staring at it and I'm going to give it a few more attempts before letting whatever butcher they're sending out touch my baby! Thanks so much for putting this information out there! Even if I can't get it to recover, we know now that Dell knows that seven beeps are send a new motherboard time. Here's to hoping no one else will ever have to hear it! [2012-11-05-EDIT so as not to double-post - No luck, now trying to find the status with Dell and they have no record I ever called them over the weekend. I can tell already that this is going to be fun ] [2012-11-07-FINAL EDIT - Motherboard swapped out as of today and I'm back up and running. The tech mentioned he's already done two others this week due to the same issue, so hoping they got things sorted out with that update.]

I'm trying to recover from a failed A08 flash, I follow the procedure, and after plugging the cable in with END pressed, I get the high-speed fans that come on instantly and it looks like the USB on the E-SATA port is initialied (quick flash on the thumbdrive), but nothing happens after that. I don't see it trying to access the file (tried both A03 and A08 binaries as the M18R2.hdr) but no beeps, no more USB access. When I try to power on the laptop normally, it only cycles through a series of 7 beeps over and over with no display. The USB stick is FAT-32 (so the capitalization shouldn't matter, but I copy/pasted the filename precisely), tried a second stick to no avail as well. Any helpful suggestions? (Dell is planning a service call, but I'd rather not have a 3rd party by-the-hour guy climbing through the guts of the system -- no offense, of course, to those in similar vocations, but in my experience the overall the competency of the people they have sent to fix stuff over the years is.. varied, to put it politely).

Are they using the same pipe for the newer CPUs? (i.e. the 3940XM rather than the 3920XM?)