BIOS Problem.

[RileyRandom]

What you are about to read will probably be a big ball of clutter, so bare with me.

I've been having problems with my BIOS ever since my laptop fan went bad on me.
I bought a new fan and right after that my computer would go into the BIOS and shut down mid way. If i got lucky enough it would start up after about 20 tries. I figured it was my fan so i took my laptop, and my sisters, (shhhhh) we have the same laptops and took them apart, i swapped the fans. First i started her laptop and hers started up fine. I tried to start mine up and now instead of shutting down midway in the BIOS it either does one of 2 things. The first thing it may do it show the very first part of the BIOS where it shows a little loading bar, then the screen will go black, then restart that process again.
The second thing it will do is it goes past the first little loading screen and it will go to a all black screen with blinking underscore. Now it will do either of 2 more things from here, it will either just sit and hang here or it will stay there for about 30 seconds then continue to boot up regularly. Once from here i don't have any troubles what so ever.

theres like a 70% chance it will go into the loop and 30 percent chance it will make it past there. At the black screen with the blinking underscore its like a 50% 50% chance. It's just very annoying and it can take like 5 minutes just to make it through the BIOS.


I have a dell inspiron 1521 with BIOS version A06.

Now, i really hope that made since.

 

[seekermeister]

I really know nothing about laptops, but if anything like a regular PC in this regards, I would tend to suspect a corrupt BIOS or a damaged BIOS chip. I know that accessing the components within a laptop is considerably more difficult than on a PC, but if you knew whether or not your BIOS chip is accessible and is socketed, you could buy a new chip from the BIOS Depot, and I would bet that would fix the problem. Of course, you could also flash the BIOS, but that is something that I have tended to avoid, because of the possiblity of something going awry.

 

[harpua]

Flashing the Bios is usually a fairly simple procedure. It's worth a try to see if that will solve the problem although I'm not clear from the description exactly what the problem is. But in any event, it's a good idea to have the most updated bios available installed on any machine that was designed for a previous version of Windows that is running W7.

Instructions on how to flash the bios and bios file downloads can usually be found on the manufacturer's support site for the particular machine in question, in this case Dell.

So the OP should go to Dell's support site and check if there are updated bios and drivers available for the machine in question and, if so, update them.

 

[RileyRandom]

The BIOS is already running the latest version, i have never had to update it.