Dell BIOS flash error - e1405

Tried to flash my e1405 BIOS to revision 8, but I got an error saying the flasher application could not allocate the memory required and to reboot. Did so, and it went on its merry way, trying to allocate memory and again the flasher crashed. Restarted again, and luckily my system boots fine. That's good.

But now whenever I try to run the flasher, i get this error:

Application Error Return 0x00000610
Windows Error Return 0x00000002

please contact support, blah, blah.

Restarted a billion times, safe mode, etc etc. No go. Re-downloaded, checked for completeness... Downloaded on different machines. The application itself is fine.

I found one thread here that suggested using a bootable unprotected-memory-mode CD but I would prefer fixing this problem directly.

Dell support says it's a 'known issue' and that they 'are looking into it'. From posts on their own forums, it seems that is the boilerplate response, and that people have been having the same problem, verbatim, since at least last year- with no solution offered.

I've tried several flashers of varying revisions and they all generate the same error. This is driving me slightly nutty. I'm a tech and this is the kind of mysterious problem that keeps me up at night.

Anybody have a solution or suggestion? I wonder if the BIOS locked itself somehow during the failed flashing process and now can't be overwritten...

 

Does Dell offer a floppy disk boot bios upgrade or just a windows one?

 

Unfortunately the bios updater is a 3.8mb program... The updater will work in DOS but will not run for me, for the same reasons above.

 

You could try flashing from a USB key, I've flashed the bios on an e1505 and an m1210 multiple times with no problems, good luck.

 

i work for dell in technical support and i had a call from a cust who had the same issue you are having getting the error with the bios flash 0x00000610 etc, no matter what i did the flash did not work same issue even with early versions of the flash, i eventually set the cust computer back to factory(how the system was shipped from dell) and the cust was then able to perform the flash no problem, so basically this issue is not a dell caused it is either the os ie:windows updates or some other software on your system causing the issue

 

I had the same problem, and did a search to try to find how to fix it. I found this thread, and later on this thread on Dell's forums. One of the posts there had a solution, I tried it, and it worked! Here's what worked for me (in case anyone else finds this thread...)

 

It is to big to fit in a floppy disk

 

After not being able to update the BIOS on my E1505 for quite a while, I did that ^^ and it worked perfectly. I went from BIOS A12 to A17, finally! Hopefully others will find this thread too.

My question for dell_tech is why deleting the BIOS stuff from the registry fixes this error?