E5-521 Black screen of death – where get BIOS update that includes DOS dir?

I know this post is quite old but I wanted to post this for the next guy. I spent 3-4 days getting a laptop back to life and this type of problem should not occur normally.

I just ran into a board that would not POST. When you booted up it would stay at a black screen and the CPU fan would spin at a normal rate. Tried the simple stuff removing battery and discharging caps...I had to disassemble it to remove the RAM and when I fired it back up, it provided a beep code indicating "No ram". This tells me that the board is in good shape. In the past I remember testing boards with defective GPUs and the number 1 thing they wouldn't do was provide beep codes. The board never made it far enough to even load the BIOS or POST code that would execute the beeps. I had also tried known good RAM to verify that it was not the RAM preventing POST. This lead me to believe that the BIOS was somehow corrupted. I know with some dell models there are regions in the SPI flash that change when you enter and exit the BIOS setup screen. I've seen it.

Here is how I fixed this board. You will definitely need an external SPI flash programmer. This board would not perform the BIOS recovery even with a properly formatted USB drive, and a properly named FD file, holding down key combo Fn+Esc. You can get a cheap CH341A from Amazon for $8, or $15 if you want the additional adapters and boards. Use AsProgrammer in Windows or Flashrom in Linux.

To get the .fd file you have to run the Z5WAE104.exe. I would recommend running this in a VM. It was trying to poll my board and caused a blue screen. If you just extract the exe, the FD file will not be there. If you run the exe, there will be an additional file in the Temp folder where it extracted. File: isflash.bin. It will match an entry in the platform.ini file. This file will be 9,869KB in size which is larger than the SPI Flash on your board. This bin has an additional stub/payload that needs to be removed. There is a tool that does this for you called InsydeImageExtractor. Available on Github. Run the bin file through that and you will be left with an 8MB flash image that you can write directly to the SPI Flash module on the board. Chip is located near the CPU. This board had an EN25Q64 flash module which is 64Mbit == 8MB. I was able to flash the .fd file with the chip in-circuit and didn't have any problems. The board took about 20-30 seconds on first power up to come alive but it finally booted. I then took a dump of the flash and I noticed that it re-wrote the product information back into the flash module. Usually you need special tools to update product info, serial, and board serial. This is great! Windows is still activated. The cert is good. Fixed!