Bricked XPS 1645. Help!

Less than a month after receiving my 3rd replacement system from dell, I experienced strange problem... I couldn't adjust the screen brightness anymore, altought the quickset was showing movement, the brightness was constantly at max. So I get into dell tech support chat, explain the problem and the guy send me a link to a program that would grand him access to my machine.

He login and start installing some drivers... chipset and etc. He try to flash my bios but i stop him even before downloading it and told him that he will not do that on my laptop. Then he said that he needs to restart the system and this should fix everything. I said ok.

In the mean time I got a phone call and in the moment I look back at my pc the bios flash program was running, somewhere in the middle of the proccess the dell tech OK all windows and the system went for restart. I coudnt believe my eyes... in a while the screen went solid white and stayed like this for about 3-4 minutes, after that I got bsod.... after restarting the system by disconecting everything out... screen doesnt show anything, all lights are staying solid on and nothing happens. The system fan is not running and if the laptop is on for 5 mins the bottom get extremely hot.

Dell is sending new mobo, but it will take around 3 weeks as I am not in US right now, so in the mean time I read about something called crisis bios recovery tool for phoenix bios.

I am trying to do the so called "blind flash" using flash drive. I have the correct bios image plus I have created a bootable usb flash drive using the wincris.exe program from phoenix.

After booting the laptop with the usb drive pluged in, I have partial success. I can see be the led on the drive that it is being readed for about 35-40 seconds after this the led goes off, but nothing else happens.

Apparently there is some key combination that needs to be pressed before even plugin the ac power in. I read that for some laptop is Fn+B... however this doesnt work with xps 1645.

Does anyone here knows:
1. What is the key combination that triggers boot lock ?
2. What is the correct version of WINCRIS.EXE ?
3. What is the correct version of PHLASH16.EXE ?

Does anyone ever attempted crisis bios recovery(blind flash) on studio xps 1645? Any success?

Thanks! Any help is greatelly appreciated.

 

After exactly three days of reading and messing around with my system, I AM VERY HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE that i have successfully recovered it from dead bios back to working Seven!

I am posting back so if someone else get trapped in this extremely unpleasant situation will be able to revive his/her laptop.

*************
WARNING: This is tested to work on Studio XPS 1645 i7
WARNING: May work on another similar laptop, but... you know.. you never know
*************

What you will need (or at least this is what I had!)
1. One working computer with USB port (Mine Dell Inspiron E1505)
2. One USB flash drive (Mine 1GB micro center)
3. Phoenix Bios Crisis Recovery program
4. The CORRECT phlash16.exe program
5. Bios image for Studio XPS 1645 (I have the A03 version in .WPH format)
7. One Bricked Studio XPS 1645
7. Patience

To make the things easy for you, I will zip all needed files and will try to attach here for download.

Here what you need to do.
1. Download the zip file from here
2. Extract the contents to any location
3. Plug in your USB flash (All information on it will be lost!)
4. Navigate to the folder where you extracted the zip file
5. Run as Administrator WINCRIS.EXE
6. Click START

If everything is ok you will have a bootable flash drive with exactly three files on it
1. BIOS.WPH
2. MINIDOS.SYS
3. PHLASH16.EXE

Take the flash drive out and move to the bricked system
Perform this steps:
1. Open the backcover
2. Disconnect the harddrive (not sure if needed, but mine was out)
3. Remove media from the bluray(not sure if needed, but i removed mine. It was hard btw, the emergency eject button is hard to press)
4. Remove the battery
5. Disconnect the power cable
6. Plug in the usb drive (I used the eSata/usb combo port)
7. Connect the power
8. Press the power button

If everything is OK you will see the usb drive led blinking for about 40 seconds. After about 3 minutes your computer will restart itself. Remove the usb and watch it go back alive!

Remove the power cord and reconnect whatever you disconnected, close the back cover, power up and login to windows.

Few other things.
First credit goes to each and anyone that ever spent sometime to post information regarding blind bios flashing online. I used many tutorials and many people experience in order to compile this guide(Believe me there is no such online at the moment of this writing!)

Interesting Facts:
Many people were posting that the crisis recovery procedure needs to be triggered by some key combination before the ac gets connected(Fn+B, Windows+B, F, Fn+ESC, Holding down the END key...) However this was not my case. I just plug in the AC and then pressed the power button.

The turnkey for me was finding the right PHLASH16.EXE as there are many versions out there. The one that worked for me and seems it is because of the i7 was ver. 1.7.0.18(I will include that one in the zip file)

How and why blind bios recovery is possible
Here is the theory, almost every Phoenix bios chip has a small write protected section in it. This section is hard to be overwritten(not impossible). The idea is that if that section (BOOT BLOCK) is OK, It can stop the bios from being read and handle the control to some basic device(such as usb pen or usb floppy). This properly created device will contain a program(in our case PHLASH16.EXE) and a good copy of the bios(called BIOS.WPH). The sole purpose of this program is to copy whatever is in bios.wph to the system EEPROM chip that is actually the system bios. After the job is done the program simply restart the system.

Note:
It looks like attaching files is not the strongest side of this board, so i put it here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/yykkndxmojj/Crisis BIOS recovery Studio XPS 1645 [by Andrew].zip

Good luck to all

 

my laptop is Dell studio xps 1640 and it has bricked after update bios.
when i press power button, there is nothing after three media buttons flash i my laptop can not boot to win!
plz tell me how to fix it?
and how to extract file from bios.exe to bios.wph?

 

Very nice work...

This kind of bios "invincibility" can be used for any number things, including the addition of profiles for 130W adapters. Writing custom bios software is pretty risky business, but the ability to fix a bricked machine changes that.


Thanks (I won't be using it any time soon though )

 

Good Job Bulforce in fixing the issue and putting it up for us to see (Y). Now I have no fears of bricking my system

 

Well, am not sure what kind of packages dell is providing for the 1640, but if you can find one that is marked DOS you can use dos emulator called dosbox -> http://www.dosbox.com/

execute the bios.exe in the emulator and it will extract its contents for you, then just exit dos box and get the files that you need bios.wph and phlash16.exe then follow the tutorial from my previous post.

If the only bios packages that you can find are for windows then I really dont know how you can extract them SAFELY! I said safely because the problem is that once you execute bios.exe under window it will indeed unpack itself somewhere on your harddrive usually c:\dell
however dell tend to release those bios.exe installers with fully automated procedures in them. And the bios flash starts without asking you anything and in some cases without even checking is this the correct system. And this can result in another bricked computer.

There are some posts on the internet suggesting that bios.exe can be executed followed by switch (something like -writehdr) and this is supposed just to unpack the files, however I haven't tested any of those. The bios files for 1645 that I put in the archive were taken from internet(some guy put them together but there was no info how he extracted them)

Here is the dell ftp server for bioses
http://ftp.dell.com/bios/


Hopefully this helps.

 

I added your recovery kit to my BIOS package over at this thread.

I hope you don't mind. If you do let me know!

 

I don't mind. In fact as looking at your thread I have to thank you as I actually took the bios file from your zip on first place. Sorry for not crediting you directly when putting my stuff together, but it was a big mess and didn't remember what exactly came from where.

 

No problem, I'm glad it helped!

 

Thank you so much for your work on this, it just saved my since A07's windows flash bricked my machine. Now my laptop is alive again, WITH A07