Bios Recovery; Bios Recovery Using Hard Drive - Dell Latitude 3300 Service Manual

BIOS recovery

The BIOS recovery is designed to fix the main BIOS, and cannot work if the boot is damaged. The BIOS recovery will not work in the event
of EC corruption, ME corruption, or a hardware related issue. The BIOS recovery image should be available on the unencrypted partition
on the drive for BIOS recovery feature.
Rollback BIOS feature
Two versions of the BIOS recovery image are saved on the hard drive:
• Current running BIOS (old)
• To-be-updated BIOS (new)
The old version is already stored on the hard drive. The BIOS adds new version to the hard drive, maintains the old version, and deletes
other existing versions. For example, A00 and A02 versions are already on the hard drive, A02 is the running BIOS. The BIOS adds A04,
maintains A02, and deletes A00. Having two BIOS version enables the Rollback BIOS feature.
If the recovery file cannot be stored (hard drive is out of space), the BIOS sets a flag to indicate this condition. The flag is reset in the
event it later becomes possible to store the recovery file. The BIOS notifies the user during POST and in BIOS Setup, the BIOS recovery is
degraded. BIOS recovery through hard drive may not be possible, however BIOS recovery through USB flash drive is still possible.
For USB key: root directory or "\"
BIOS_IMG.rcv: the recovery image stored on the USB key.

BIOS recovery using hard drive

NOTE: Ensure that you have the previous version and the latest version of the BIOS from the Dell support site available
to use.
NOTE: Ensure that you have the file type extensions visible in the operating system (OS).
1. Browse to the location of the BIOS update executable (.exe) files.
2. Rename the BIOS executable files to BIOS_PRE.rcv for the earlier version of the BIOS and BIOS_CUR.rcv for the latest version of
the BIOS.
For example, if the latest version's file name is PowerEdge_T30_1.0.0.exe, rename it to BIOS_CUR.rcv and if the previous
version's file name is PowerEdge_T30_0.0.9.exe, rename it to BIOS_PRE.rcv
NOTE:
a. If the hard drive is new, there will be no operating system installed.
b. If the hard drive has been partitioned at the Dell factory, there will be a Recovery Partition available.
3. Disconnect the hard drive and install the hard drive into another system that has a full operational operating system.
4. Start up the system and in the Windows operating system environment follow these steps to copy the BIOS recovery file to the
Recovery Partition.
a) Open a Windows Command Prompt window.
b) At the prompt, type diskpart to start the Microsoft DiskPart.
c) At the prompt, type list disk to list out the available hard drives.
Select the hard drive that was installed in Step 3.
d) At the prompt, type list partition to view the available partitions on this hard drive.
e) Select Partition 1 which is the Recovery Partition. The size of the partition will be 39 MB.
f) At the prompt, type set id=07 to set the partition ID.
NOTE: The partition will be visible to the operating system as Local Disk (E) to read and write data.
g) Create the following folders in Local Disk (E), E:\EFI\Dell\BIOS\Recovery.
h) Copy both the BIOS files BIOS_CUR.rcv and BIOS_PRE.rcv to the recovery folder on Local Disk (E).
i) In the Command Prompt window, at the DISKPART prompt, type set id=DE.
After the executing this command, the partition Local Disk (E) will not be accessible by the OS.
5. Shut the system down, remove the hard drive, and install the hard drive into the original system.
6. Start the system up and boot to System Setup, in the Maintenance section ensure that BIOS Recovery from Hard Drive is
enabled in the BIOS Recovery section of the setup.
Diagnostics 97