Hot take: the 30 minute BIOS update that ate my whole Friday

I spent over 4 hours debugging a Dell Optiplex that would boot to a black screen after what should have been a simple BIOS update from their own utility. Turned out the USB port I plugged the flash drive into was USB 3.0 and the board's old controller just couldn't handle it during the flash, so it corrupted the firmware. Has anyone else run into a fix that took way longer than the actual problem was worth?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_knight712d ago

Four hours for a fix I could've done in ten minutes if I'd just read the fine print first.

ryantorres12d ago

Yeah I read a forum post from some embedded engineer a while back saying older Dell boards treat USB 3.0 like a propped open door. The controller doesn't handle the handshake right so it corrupts mid flash. Cheap fix woulda been to use a USB 2.0 hub between the drive and the port. But yeah I bet Dell's utility doesn't warn you about that anywhere in the docs.