Comments on: Warning – Dell Inspiron 8500 Video BIOS Flash

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:14:07 +0000

Same thing here.Someone gave me an 8500 to reload, and I ran that stupid utility for 3 hours and it just hung there. Now I have a boat anchor. WTF . I was going to attempt the blind flash but its not booting to anything at this point. This machine was perfect right before I flashed it. Anyone else get any satisfaction?

By: Crispin

Crispin — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:47:29 +0000

hey frustrated – you’ve got to mimick the steps as if you were blind – with no screen.

Attaching a spare monitor doesnt work because the display still goes thru the bricked card…

1. build a bootable to DOS USB flash drive – theres a HP util that does this – google it.

2. copy the NVFlash util onto the drive with the correct rom to flash

3. Then get a pen and paper and a working PC.

4. Go through the steps on the working PC right up until you press enter for the NVFlash utility – noting down every keypress. DO NOT FLASH the working PC (obviously).

5. Then put the flash drive into the 8500 and boot the machine – press F12 as it boots a few times then wait a couple of seconds – then press enter (I think) to try and boot from the USB Thumb drive.

6. Now blindly follow your notes and press the right keys in order – I think I made a batch file called g.bat or something similar so that the only keypresses I had to make were “g” and then enter, and then I think the nvflash requires you to press “Y” but if you have made notes then you’ll know that.

7. If you follow the steps correctly then NVFlash will do its thing and the machine will beep – reboot itself and then the display will work as normal.

good luck!

By: Frustrated

Frustrated — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:42:33 +0000

Crispin:
this has just happened to me. How did you fix this issue? could you please explain the steps you went through to resolve it?

By: Crispin

Crispin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:46:55 +0000

Dell were no help at all, moaned about warranty and all sorts of crap excuses.

So I booted to a USB thumb drive and blind re-flashed the video BIOS using nvflash.

Card is now unbricked thank F@*K! screw you dell and the horse you rode in on.

By: Crispin

Crispin — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:39:10 +0000

This has just happened to me when rebuilding a friends machine… I cant understand why they leave the update on there – card is bricked and dell are about to get an earful – stupid idiots.

By: Steve Johnston

Steve Johnston — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 04:19:32 +0000

I’m afraid that Dell still hasn’t sorted out the video BIOS on their website as it has happened to me as well. Glad I have found this blog as I will refer it to them when I try and get them to pay for ‘their’ mistake.

By: Jamyce

Jamyce — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:24:16 +0000

I wish I had seen this last night. I downloaded the utility and now my computer is totally dead. It has power but it does not boot up at all. I called Dell and they treid to say that I must have dropped my computer. I have never dropped it and it was fine until I downloaded this utility which was recommended on their site.

By: darryl_uwlaw

darryl_uwlaw — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:29:41 +0000

Just found this out here. We’ll see if we can’t get Dell to help with the problem. Wish we’d read this before hand.