No Insyde BIOS Recovery .FD ?

Discussion in 'BIOS Mods' started by ionbasa, Aug 30, 2015.

  1. ionbasa

    ionbasa MDL Novice

    Feb 18, 2010
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    #1 ionbasa, Aug 30, 2015
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
    Long story short: I have a friend drop off an DELL Inspiron 17-3721 which seems to have had a bad BIOS flash. I can get it to power on, but not to post.

    So, I downloaded the BIOS executable from Dell's website. It can be found here: h*tp://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER03262586M/1/3721A14.exe
    Its an an compressed SFX executable, so I unzipped with 7Zip.

    It's an Insyde BIOS, so naturally there is the INSYDE flasher included. Also included are "isflash.bin" and "ME.bin".

    Opened "isflash.bin" in Phoenixtool to get proper name of recovery bios file. Phoenixtool said it should be "VAW00X64.fd"
    It also gave an error at the end saying it failed to extract HDR file.

    Next, I tried running
    Code:
    InsydeFlash.exe VAW00X64.fd /g
    To extract the recovery file. The tool runs, but the file is exactly 0 bytes.

    Thoughts?
     
  2. LatinMcG

    LatinMcG Bios Borker

    Feb 27, 2011
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  3. Tito

    Tito Super Mod / Adviser
    Staff Member

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    #3 Tito, Aug 30, 2015
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
  4. ionbasa

    ionbasa MDL Novice

    Feb 18, 2010
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    #4 ionbasa, Aug 30, 2015
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
    (OP)
    How would renaming isflash.bin to the raw .fd file help? It's not the proper size, and I can't use the a DOS flasher as it won't post, so I needed the raw recovery image for an emergency flash. I've double checked ram. There shouldn't be any reason for the chipset to have become desoldered as far as I know.

    This seemed to have worked. The resulting file is exactly 6114 Kb or 6.1 Mb. I'll try to use the Insyde BIOS recovery using a FAT32 flash drive and by holding down <WIN> + <B>. If that doesn't work, are there any other keystrokes I should try?
     
  5. LatinMcG

    LatinMcG Bios Borker

    Feb 27, 2011
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    Fn Esc .. Fn End