Fixing dell bios

I have been facing a strange problem that I cannot turn my dell inspiron 1420 off. The laptop turns on whenever I shutdown the machine. Only possible solution to turn it off was to remove the battery. I guessed that it would be a bios issue.

So I called the dell customer service. The customer care guy confirmed that it is a bios issue and instructed to download 1420_A10.exe file for flashing the bios. Unfortunately I hadn’t any dos boot disks to execute it.? But finally found out a solution to flash using GNU/Linux itself.

Here are the commands to make it work.

# apt-get install syslinux tofrodos


# wget http://linux.dell.com/biosdisk/biosdisk-0.75-2.tar.gz


# tar -xzvvf biosdisk-0.75-2.tar.gz -C .


# cd biosdisk-0.75-2


# ./install.sh


#biosdisk mkimage 1420_A10.EXE

Use a pendrive to boot the freedos. Insert a pendrive and make it bootable

# mkdosfs /dev/sdb

# mount /dev/sdb /mnt/disk

# mv /tmp/D820_A09.img /mnt/disk

# cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /mnt/disk

# syslinux /dev/sdb

Create a file syslinux.cfg in /mnt/disk Add the following lines

DEFAULT linux
LABEL linux
KERNEL memdisk
APPEND initrd=1420_A10.img

Run:

# umount /dev/sdb

Reboot and boot from the pendrive.

You can flash bios from pendrive :)