I recall a scene in the movie Apocalypse Now where the character Chef get off the patrol boat to look for mangoes. He gets jumped by a tiger in the jungle and comes screaming back to the boat like the whole North Vietnamese Army is after him. He sits down muttering "never get out of the boat, never get out of the boat."

Today I had the computer corollary to that. "Never let the support tech talk you into upgrading the BIOS." After two weeks of work I had my new Dell Precision 3620 workstation just about ready to replace my old machine. 95% + tweaked to my liking. About all that was left was to rewrite my nightly housekeeping and backup script and copy the latest data from the old box.

Monday evening I suspended the new machine as is my normal process when not using it. At least I thought I did. Tuesday morning I found that it had been rebooted. It was late Monday evening. Probably my error. I suspended the machine. It crashed hard with a K dump. Never had that happen before. Rebooted again and suspend - same thing. I did observer an error message relating to BIOS, corrupted and PM (power management?).

I went into the BIOS screen. Everything looked like I had configured it. For lack of something better to do I did a Restore to factory settings drill. The machine now boots and suspends and awakes no problem. However, when I looked at the BIOS settings it appeared that NOTHING had been reset. Nothing in the owner's manual about this.

Today, as I had paid for "premium" support - actually the salesman added it pro-bono as he did not ship it second day as it was supposed to be shipped - anyhow I called tech support and asked why Restore to factory did not change anything. After dancing around the issue for a while the tech said that the cause was the old BIOS and that updating it would fix the problem. It fixed the problem allright. Bricked the machine. I finally got it to boot but is will not shut down. He said he needed to escalate the issue to a higher level support team. No, I said, I have owned it less that 30 days. Send a call tag and have it back. So he did (at least he stated the process.) Still waiting on the email with the UPS label.

So remember "never upgrade the BIOS"

Ken

p.s. I ordered another of the same machine as I had purchased a 240 GB PCIe 3.0 4 lane M.2 SSD, another 8 GB of memory and a 2 TB mechanical drive to go in the box. In theory I should be able to plug all of this stuff in the new box and keep going. We will see.

If that doesn't work perhaps I will get a REAL Linux workstation from Penguin Computing. However, it looks like their entry level machine has two 8 core Opterons and 64 GB of RAM. I would have rent out capacity on that thing. I do not have anything which would even work up a sweat on such a machine.

RANT WARNING

I had a neighbor who set up Dell support in a place far far away. My ex had to have dell support assist. After 3 months it never got fixed and we sent in back. Dell still owes me $66.

Sadly the tech support for many companies like Dell and ATT and T-Mobile are the worst. The people may be good people but they are not really not technical and have no business telling folks to do silly stuff. Sheeze.

I'm not sure Dell even tests systems at all. I've heard Japanese Sony products were tested by the user but that is different.

End of rant.

You'd think there would be a failsafe way to recover bios.

We have used HP products here for a long time.

My favouritist movie - hell, it even started with a Doors number. Had to be a good movie.
So your hook worked (on me at least).

Never had a problem updating BIOS - one of my regular maint checks on all my private machines. Done this XPS several times. Same laptop has had a motherboard replaced (years ago, but within warranty). Bloke (Fujitsu sub-contractor) dropped into my house and did it on the kitchen table while we shared a coffee. So experiences, as usual, may vary.

Just as a footnote, I seldom have had to call T-Mobile support, but, when I have, I have found it quite satisfactory.

Back in the "OLD" days a BIOS update was a reversible thing. The first Dell product I worked with was a PCs Ltd 286 - 8 Mhz. Much faster than an IBM PC-AT which ran at 6 Mhz. We were attempting to hook up a Barr Hasp card to drive a printer from a remote timeshare computer. The card did not work and the vendor suggested upgrading the BIOS. The PCs Ltd/Dell tech support fellow sent me a plastic tube with several ROM chips which were the new BIOS. Plugged them in and the Barr Hasp card worked just fine. After a while I decided that the machine was too good just to drive a printer so I replaced it with an IBM (original) PC. The PCs Ltd ended up on my desk for several years.

And then there was a co-worker who had a Tava (IBM compatible) PC clone. He wanted better than compatible so he purchased a burner and several EPROMS from Radio Shack. He "borrowed" the BIOS chips from a genuine IBM PC at the office, took them home and in the dark of night cloned them to his EPROMS. He an IBM identical PC clone

I guess if I want good customer support I should stick to welding. I have had EXCELLENT service from Hobart, Miller and Hypertherm.

Ken

BIOS upgrades are one reason I advise people to keep a dual boot if they have one that is working.

Just sayin'

BIOS upgrades used to be done by floppy.
I "just" (literally, 2d) threw one out. Sat here for 6 years.

I need a BIOS upgrade "these days" with no floppy, I think about a new board?

What are those things doing "these days"?

I guess I'm an oddity. I've never had an issue in 20+ years caused by a bios/firmware update if there wasn't already pre-existing hardware issues. I update my bios the instant a new one is released, as nowadays 99.9% of the bios updates are no longer compatibility fixes or performance fixes, but rather security updates.

Good morning Habitual,

Your comment re. dual boot intrigues me. Please elaborate.

As to the update process "these days" - that is part of how I got into this trouble. I ordered the machine with Ubuntu 14.04 pre-installed. Not that I wanted to run a somewhat old version of Ubuntu - I have Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on a couple of machines. I was planning to install CentOS 7 and did so. The reasons I chose a Linux pre-install were:

- Saved $85 by not purchasing a copy of Windoze which I never planned to use
- Minimized the chance of hardware compatibility issues (the machine was also offered with RHEL 7)
- Finally it eliminated the "we don't support Linux" excuses from tech support (and I sort of challenged the fellow about how to do the upgrade without Windows - curiosity and the cat etc.)

That said... The BIOS update was done as follows:

- download the upgrade file e.g. Precision_Tower_3620_2.1.8.exe (this looked and smelled and on a Win 7 virtual machine virus scanned like a Windows executable - I have not examined the file header yet)
- copy the file to a USB flash drive
- insert the USB drive in the computer
- power on and press F12 for the one time boot menu
- select "BIOS Upgrade" from the boot menu

The computer did its BIOS upgrade thing - actually rebooted a couple of times during the process. No DOS bootable floppy required - that was cool. BIOS upgrade caused a previously non-existant problem - that was not cool.

The actual problem was this... The computer WOULD boot up from the internal drive or from a USB drive (e.g. Clonezilla Live image). When I selected Shutdown the OS seemed to do so. However, the machine never powered off. I had to do a hard power off. After that it would take a couple of tries to get it to boot again. And shutdown would again not power off.

Timothy Miller - good point about security fixes. I have occasionally upgraded BIOS versions over the past 30 years. This is the first time I hosed anything up. I guess I need to review what BIOS upgrades are available for my collection of machines and see if any security issues stand out. I wish there was a way to backup the current BIOS for possible recovery. In this case I was upgrading from 1.3.6 to 2.1.8. Quite a jump it would seem. The tech was unable to find an "upgrade" file for the original version. The BIOS does have a setting to allow downgrading but with no file to downgrade to...

Ken

Maybe the tech told his colleagues, "I love the smell of burning EEPROMs... It smells like... victory."

I keep a small SATA HD around with a bootable DOS primary partition. I copy the new BIOS file and if necessary flash utility to that HD using a USB dock, then boot it with the desktop PC that needs the upgrade. I have yet to need a USB stick or Windows to do a BIOS upgrade, and haven't used a floppy for a BIOS upgrade for too long to remember.

I know of a person that barely knew how to turn on a computer getting a job telling people how to fix there computers. They followed some sort of troubleshooting script to tell someone how to fix something. I found out from personal experience when I had called once about a nonworking modem (warranty call), if it isn't in the script their lost.

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But all helplines work like that, the software ones too. Technical experts command too high an hourly fee to be wasted on telephone duty. What you get is nearly always a clerk with a script.

I've always assumed that changing the BIOS is the desperate last resort and I've never done it on a PC. Now on the Sinclair QL you just pulled a ROM chip and inserted a new one...

"They followed some sort of troubleshooting script to tell someone how to fix something" There you go.

I try to advise people that a bios update should only be performed if the errata provided by the OEM is exactly what their problem is. If the errata says fixed usb problem and you had a usb problem then this would be time to update. Otherwise updating bios is like changing oil in a car when the tire is flat.

Thanks for all the interesting comments. Tech Support? Sometimes you win and then there is the rest of the time. I had a Tech Support fellow at my ISP put me on to Newzbin back many years ago. Imagine that. I had been a serious Usenet participant for many years but had never heard of Newzbin. Kept my dialup modem busy for sure

And as to BIOS updates... I generally follow jefro's guidance. In this case... I guess I was too curious about how they would update the BIOS on a Linux box. Now I know The replacement machine is due in tomorrow. In theory I should be able to install my hard drives and extra memory, boot it, change the host name and finish getting ready to replace my existing CentOS 6 box.

Ken