Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

Mine has upgraded 80GB of RAM (2x16 + 2x32) and 3 Samsung 970 Evo Plus, 4k screen.

Got the motherboard replaced on Wednesday last week with the technician saying 'no more updates'?? The courtesy call after the replacement was a bit hesitant to suggest immediately updating the BIOS but all he said was to make sure I have the power connected, I had when doing it last time. The mb has BIOS 1.9. A bit hesitant doing the upgrade, maybe I'll wait for 1.12..

 

Seems like the 4K screen is the determining factor here. Not sure why. But I would suggest against upgrading unless you can get a setup working with a 1080p display attached and access to the BIOS with the laptop lid shut.

 

Well, I was just told by dell support that my MB needs replaced also due to the bios not updating. I have the 4k option also.

 

I have joined the bricked MB club unfortunately. Thanks to @DwayneTheWizard, who was able to recover his motherboard, I think I'm on the right track but don't have the recovery file.

Here's a message I sent him if someone beats him to it and can find the file:

I did more digging and it looks like the RCV BIOS file might be in your EFI partition under Dell/bios. If you don't mind looking there, you can mount that partition under an administrative command prompt by doing:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 0 (or whatever number is your boot)
list partition
select partition 1 (probably 1, or whatever is 500MB)
assign letter=P (whatever unused drive letter)
exit

Then from that same command prompt go into P:\EFI\Dell\bios

I think that's where it lurks but don't have a non-RAID install to look for it. BIOS updates are supposed to put a fresh one there (or somewhere) as well.

Recovery is done by holding the power button for about 30 seconds when turned off. 20ish seconds in you'll see the front light blink a few times, looking for the file. (thanks again @DwayneTheWizard)

Sadly, Dell doesn't even know this is possible and won't help. Hopefully we start hearing some recovery stories!

 

You should be able to mount RAID disks from the Windows recovery environment.

* With the system in RAID mode, boot the Windows 10 recovery media, or a Windows 10 install media and pick the "repair my computer" option.
* Pick the option for restoring from a system image.
* In here, when asking where the image is, there should be an option to load a driver. Give it the Intel Rapid Storage "F6 floppy" driver (you can have it extracted onto a USB flash drive or something). Now, RAID disks should be visible.
* Open a command prompt (Shift+F10, or back up and select it from the recovery options) and take a peek...

 

True, when you have a functioning computer

 

Right, silly me
Hopefully someone else with a 7X40 system can look for the BIOS file.

 

Hope so too!! If it works, it will be a quick fix..

 

I found some 7540s at work and was able to get the file (BIOS_CUR.RCV). Put it on the EFI partition under EFI\Dell\Bios\Recovery and IT WORKS! Too bad Dell didn't know about this. Could probably save a lot of time/money on both ends.

 

Hey, I'd like to give this a try but I seem to be losing things in translation.

What is RCV BIOS? I assume this stands for Recovery BIOS?

@n0xlf mentioned a file (BIOS_CUR.RCV). Where do I get this from?

Just to be clear, I am on 1.10.2 BIOS version. I have downloaded the latest 1.11.2 from Dell website. It is in the form of an EXE file (Precision_7X40_1.11.2.exe). Now, can someone provide exact steps to do this? From what I understand, we are to get the file from P:\EFI\Dell\bios and replace it with the file from Precision_7X40_1.11.2.exe ? If so, how do I get the "BIOS_CUR_RCV" from "Precision_7X40_1.11.2.exe" ?

The contents of the "Precision_7X40_1.11.2.exe" file is comprised of these files:
.data
.rdata
.reloc
.rsrc
.text
CERTIFICATE
[0]

That [0] file is the one that has 16MB which I assume it's the contents of the BIOS. So, from my understanding of the previous posts, I should rename this file to "BIOS_CUR.RCV" and place it in EFI\Dell\Bios\Recovery", then press the power button for 30s to initialize the recovery through this file, but I feel that I'm missing something in the process.

Kindly clarify if the steps above would work.