M17XR2 Bricked BIO fix

[Sil]

I successfully unbricked my bios today.

- You need a USB stick; preferably 4GB or less

- Download the A10 bios from dell website. Drivers & Downloads | Dell United States

- Extract the zip file M17xR2A10.zip

- Extract the zip file CRISDICK.ZIP, found in the A10 subfolder of the extracted files above

- If you have Windows 8 your are screwed - or at least I couldn't make it work

- If your computer has Windows XP you are very lucky, run WINCRIS.EXE, choose your usb drive under the dropdown list and click start. When finished wait 5s and unplug the usb stick.

- If you have Windows 7 go to Windows Virtual PC: Home Page and follow the instructions to install windows xp mode

-Once installed and started select the USB from the usb menu.

- run WINCRIS.EXE, choose your usb drive under the dropdown list and click start. When finished wait 5s and unplug the usb stick.

- Remove the battery from the M17xR2

- Plug the usb stick in the esata port (on the left side next to the firewire port, on the left side of the laptop)

- Press and hold FN + B and turn power on.

- After a few seconds you should see the lights of the stick blinking. after about 5-10s of blinking you cand release the key combination.

- Go grab a coffee and come 20-30min later, hopefully you should see the windows sign in.

[Michael]

This is called blind flash, and should work regardless of windows version.

All wincris does is make a bootable DOS usb drive, which can be accomplished by many tools (one such tool is the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool), once that's done it's a matter of placing the bios file in the root of the usb drive, i am just not sure about the filename of the bios file (which you could share with us here please )

[goodstone]

This is called blind flash, and should work regardless of windows version.

All wincris does is make a bootable DOS usb drive, which can be accomplished by many tools (one such tool is the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool), once that's done it's a matter of placing the bios file in the root of the usb drive, i am just not sure about the filename of the bios file (which you could share with us here please )

Hello people.

I concur that CRISDISK will not work on win7 or win8. Windows xp or Zo mode are the only ways that seems to format and place the blind flash bios on to stick.

I have spent many hours on this subject (author on NBR first BIOS MOD m17xR2). the hp tool didn't work for me either. I even tried to image the usb stick to no avail.

Note. you can blind flash from any usb port including esata.