Laptop Destroyed By Windows Update | Make It Stop! Microsoft
New day, a new laptop to repair and this time we have an Insprion 16 5625 laptop. Let's see what's wrong. But the system will not turn on hangs at 2.4 amps.
Let's see what we get. All right, this one uses a smaller tip (4.5mm) Dell charger. Plug it in, see if we get any amps drawn. So we're looking for a look right here.
Hey we're getting 0.7, .6, .6, .7 1.8, 2.08. We're just watching to see if it moves around.
It’s just hang in a 2.08. So the normal process for a startup of a laptop, it should jump up to like one and a half amps and jump down to point four. And then jump up. So down jump up.
And it even when it's running, it should not sit there a point or 2.08 amps. It should be still moving around as the processor is, doing stuff where the even the chipsets doing things. So, we're going to open this thing up. Oh, we start with a CMOS reset.
So lets get this bottom open. All right. And the bottom is open. So let's start with a let me unplug the main battery here.
And we're going to unplug the CMOS battery and see if we can do a CMOS reset. The CMOS reset what you're trying to do is you're trying to rewrite the EC chip, the startup super IO. And so by depleting all the power in the system, and we're going to short out the real time clock connector here with the CMOS battery unplugged.
And what that should do when we plug it back in, it should rewrite the EC chip from the BIOS. So I'm just going to with the battery unplug still the CMOS battery, unplug still I'm going to go ahead and plug in the power, should power on by itself. See if we get anything different. .78 .81 Five six. See, this all looks normal. This part of the startup process looks normal.
With a jumping around like that. But what we're worried about is if it goes straight up that two amps again, it just sits there. So .83 .81 .8 .81 Okay.
Well it is it's staying at a number but it's not that 208 and I do have the battery unplugged. So I better was charging the battery for that extra amps that were missing. If I plug the battery back in I bet it will jump up to two amps. Let's see. Plugged in the battery. So it's hanging.
Oh, there we go. There it is. So now it went back up to that. And that's because the battery is plugged in. So I'm going to unplug the battery and see if it drops back down. Batteries unplugged now. So now it's it's running only off the charger. The battery.
.82 okay. So .69 That's the lids closed. We open the lid. So the lid sensor is working so it can tell that we're opening and closing that.
Okay. Let's go ahead and probe around and see if we see anything interesting. This may end up being like a BIOS or something like that. But we're going to start out by just probing around and see if we see anything that's shorted.
I'm going to go ahead and pull the board out. That way we can actually inspect it. All right. And the board is out. So let's go ahead and set this aside and take a look. I'll go ahead and pull this heatsink off to.
See if I got RAM. in here. All right. Let's go ahead and plug it in without anything attached. That way we can eliminate there being an issue with one of the parts that are connected to it. So we have the DC jack attached.
Everything else is not attached to it. So we're gonna look at the amps again a look right here. .4 CPU is getting warm.
We'll go ahead and just put a thermal pad on here. .5 .5. Now it's getting hot. Okay, we're getting a blink code now, if you just saw that.
But it was blinking right here. So let's let's go ahead and I'm gonna put the heatsink back on so I don't have to worry about it overheating. Let's see if we can figure out what that blink code is. It might be registering that I don't have any RAM in there because I just took out the RAM. And that's good. Whenever you have the if you take out the memory, it's showing that the member has been removed.
That means that at least it's knows what's going on. So always something good to test. So let's go ahead and check that we're going to plug that back in. Check the amps. Just hang on to .4 .2 I mean .42
okay. So we've got a blink code. one, two, orange 1, 2, 3.
So it's a 2,3. which is actually memory. Let's see if we can pull it up. So a 2,3, is no memory installed. So let's go ahead and install memory and see the code changes. See if we get a different light code.
Plug it in again. .58 .6 .43 .61. So we're just reading the amps. That's what we're just trying to figure out what the the laptop's actually trying to do .66 All right. So let's see if we're getting a light code I don't see anything.
It's like a keyboard into a real quick. When I plug a keyboard into the USB port, let's see if that power is on. Now not getting that the power up. So the caps lock isn't working.
We'll reset it real quick, we have a power light. And it turned off. All right. So it's definitely not posting, now why is it not posted. Let's go ahead and do our physical examination. It took out the heatsink.
And we're going to take off all these little covers here. That way we can look around and make sure there's nothing burnt or broken, ripped damaged, anything like that okay. Let's go to the microscope. All right.
So we have our looking around. What we're trying to find is something that's burnt. Cracked water spill, something discolored.
And all this is looking okay so far, there’s the power management chip. That seems like it's probably okay the way that it's in charge the battery and is sending voltage to the CPU and stuff like that because the CPU is getting warm. So I'm not worried about the power management chip.
LCD connector. Looks okay and there's no story with this. This just says that there's an issue, says I want power on, but it's not saying why.
Like did I change something out or did I just happen one day? So I don't see anything on this side. We're going to go ahead and flip it over and we'll just do our finish. Looking around, that looks fine.
That looks fine. It looks like it. This version doesn't have a chip. There. Another chips missing. But that's the way it's supposed to be. That's the USB-C controller chip.
So that's what handles, the information and the charging frm the USB-C. All right. Let look around some more. And I don't see anything. Everything looks good. You know, one thing we didn't try is actually plugging in through the USB-C, because we can actually charge it through that.
So let's try that. See if it powers on any differently through USB-C. Okay. Let's see.
This is the USB-C charging port instead. So .56. .41 .64 .66 .72 .56 It's moving around still, but let's see if it settles at that point. .61 Yeah, it looks like it's doing exactly the same thing. Okay. So we'll keep, keep trying to figure out what's going on with this.
So one thing is we may be missing a power rail. So we have to figure out is missing a power rail somewhere. So the voltages that on this board that we should have, we should have a 3.3. We should have a five volt. We should have a 1.2. We should have a one volt.
And those are the main ones that I always look for. And then the main power rail, which would be either the voltage from the charger, which would be 19 to 20V, or it will be, battery voltage, which on this battery is a 15 volt battery, because I guess it's a 4 cell. So, so, I mean, the main power rail could be the battery voltage, which would be like 15V or 16, probably somewhere on there.
Let's see what we can find. ... Go ahead and plug it back in again. While it's plugged in I'm gonna start looking for these voltages. And what I usually do is I just go to the coils. So here, the coil here we have 0.6V.
The coil here got 13.25. So that must be the main power rails 13.25 which seems lower than the battery. But we've got 1.8V. We got .7 and 3.3. So this, this one next to it... ...oh we have five okay.
So we have our five. All right. So. These two here, that's the 3.3V rail has the five rail
that says it's 1.8V, which I'm not sure what that is for. This was the 13.25. That's going to be the main power rail. And the the battery.
This one was point six, which seems a little low. This is an AMD board. So it doesn't even have like an Intel chipset, So I need to figure out what the voltages are in there. I bet that's what the 1.8 is because I'm used to working on Intel boards. But your memory should actually be 1.2V. So point six.
So let's see what the CPU is doing. CPU has 1.1V. 1.1. 1.8. Let's
go ahead and put the memory in there and see what changes. Okay. This 1.8V. It's interesting because. We try a different RAM slot and see if it actually pulls current differently, because it seems to be doing a little something different than a second ago.
Because we got more than one amp being pulled right now. 1.25. I think it's posting. We put the heatsink back on.
could it just have a bad memory slot? We will also hook this keyboard back up again. Got a keyboard hooked up. Plug it back in. Power light is staying on. Turned off again. .61 Now we're back to .61 again.
Interesting. So there's something wrong with the board if I flex it? Interesting? Well, I thought it was acting a little different. It may have just been because I didn't have a heat support. It was getting hot. All right. So I'm actually going to do a BIOS on this.
I'm not 100% sure what's causing that. And since all the voltage rails are present, then it leads me to believe that there's something going on with this startup process. So let's see if we can identify the BIOS chip. So it's a Winbond right there, which is a BIOS chip of some sort.
This is a Winbond 25Q128. So that would be big enough for Bios. Let's see if there's any other ones on here.
Yeah that's the only one I see. So that's the one we're going to go ahead and read. Let's go ahead and read the data off of that.
So we're taking my chip reader. And this is a five by six chip. This is a five by six pin connector, the way it works is you press it down, the pins come out. So I'm going to line up, pin one with pin one with the dot on there.
And one's on this corner. And let's pull up the chip reader okay. So what we're doing here, we want to make sure this chip number matches. We saw it as a 25Q128JW so when I put this on here I'm going to have it detect it.
So pin one, put it on here. We're going to press down, let's say auto say detect. And it was a one wq128JW. It's a SOIC It's got to be this one right here. Ok select. Ok read.
Let's go ahead and verify. Always make sure to verify. All right. So let me save I will save a copy of the customer's original.
Okay. So we're saved a copy of the original. So now we need to get a new BIOS. We'll create a new Bios on this.
It's an AMD so we should be able to just download it from Dell and put it straight in there. So this is an Inspiron 5625. We're going to go to downloads drivers. We're going to choose Bios. And then right here we're going to do the down arrow.
And then we're going to choose other formats. And then we're going to choose this format right here. Download that.
That's a recovery file. And then I always like to rename it. So I'm going to copy this naming scheme here. And I'll rename it I'm going to copy that over to my extractor tool. All right.
So we have it in here in this folder. And so I have a command shell prompt that I run. Okay, We're going to run. It's this one. Okay.
So the extraction is done. So now we'll have an actual folder. Let's name the same thing. So here's the folder. Here is our Bios file here.
It's actually should be intact. All right so here's the file we just downloaded. We had just extracted from the Dell Bios and here's the original.
So the starting is look the same. We can actually compare these. Let's go ahead and compare them. Compare files.
Yes. There's a bunch of that's different which is expected. So the starting to the same. But this section here is different. And all this section down here. So we're going to go ahead and write this new extracted Bios.
This this the way that I just did this only works on AMD boards. On Intel, you had to do something a little different. So anyway, so we're gonna take this, this file that we just extracted and we're going to load it up in here into our chip reader. Okay. We're going to load it up in there 16 megs. So now we'll put this back on here and write it back to this chip program.
I'll speed this up. There. Now it's actually programing the chip. Before it was erasing it. And now it's going to verify it. Perfect.
And then I always like to verify one extra time. Okay. There we go.
It's all written. So this will at least eliminate, if it's a Bios issue or not it's going to install this board real quick. And then we can test it okay I have the motherboard installed. Let's go ahead and give it a go. We have the fan spinning. This first startup process with a new Bios usually takes a little bit of time.
This is actually interesting. It's spinning up the fan and it's shutting it off. Spinning up the fan, shutting it off kind of in a loop. And now the fans cranking. And what do we have? What do you see here.
We got we got a screen, that says enter the service tag. So it looks like it was just a corrupted Bios. Let me go ahead and get the service tag entered. Okay.
We are in the Bios. Let me go ahead and connect the battery. The battery is connected. Let me turn it off. And reset it and turn it back on. Okay, so because I just wrote the bios on here, it's actually an engineering mode.
So me or developer mode, we got to disable that. So on this system we have to hit fn and X to disable it. This will put it in regular mode. There we go. Way out of it. Yeah okay. We go ahead and hook up its hard drive real quick. It saying there's no hard
drive installed. So on this one it was an AMD. And so the process that I just did is only works on AMD's. Okay BitLocker key.
So it's trying to boot off the drive. They can't do it because the key was actually stored in the Bios. Now the Bios got wiped. So we're able to do a bit like a recovery to get them.
But let's try the boot. So but it just need the new bios written to it. And one question that I get a lot is why would this, why would the Bios get corrupted. And unfortunately it's most of the time it's because, Microsoft is pushing out Bios, updates. I mean, we're seeing a lot of these corrupted bios, as I actually have another one right here I'm about to fix.
So that's what I'm guessing, because now it just becomes a Windows update. So let me know what you think. But now the laptop's working. Everything's up and running. I'll go ahead and finish assembling this and get it back to our customer. Thanks for watching.
2025-01-04 18:35
