Please help! 5850 not working.

My girlfriend spilled an entire beer on my m15x. It trashed the motherboard. Luckily, my brother has an almost identical m15x that he does not use ever, and has given to me. I stuck my RAM, HDD, and GFX card in his laptop. At least it turns on, but I end up with a white screen, nothing happens, then after a minute or so I get the flashing signal telling me that the BIOS failed POST when checking the GFX card.

So I swapped out the card for his, which is the problem. He has the Nvidia GeForce GT 240M. I had the ATI Radeon 5850M. I want to get the 5850 working on this computer because the 240M can't seem to do anything, but as I said before it fails POST.

The BIOS is AO8 (I was going to try to flash AO9 to see if that had anything to do with it, but I can't get a bootable disk running and nobody sells flash drives smaller than 8gb anymore.) Any ideas on how I might fix this? The 5850 shouldn't have had any contact with the beer, so I think it should be fine.

 

I would wager that the 5850 is dead. I have a 5850 that I bought used on e-bay that does the exact same thing (white screen). The weird thing is that on mine, an external monitor through the Display Port works fine, just not the laptop's monitor. You may want to try an external monitor, but if it doesn't past POST, then you're out of luck on this. Just because the liquid did not come into contact with the 5850 does not mean it could not have been damaged. It was part of the damaged motherboard at the time of the liquid spill.

One thing I would try is cleaning the 5850 using cotton swabs and alcohol. Just dab some alcohol on the cotton swab and carefully clean the circuit board and MXM contacts on both sides.


You should also upgrade to the A09 BIOS.

 

Thank you for your reply.

I have thoroughly cleaned all the components. I hope the 5850 isn't dead, I could actually play ArmA 3 at low framerates and quality with it, and I do love scripting for that game.

What is interesting is that I distinctly remember trying the 5850 in "THIS" computer back when me and my brother first got these m15xs. And I recall a failure to boot. He got the crappy card and I got a decent one because I went for the post-christmas discount, but at some point shortly after we tried to swap cards and the 5850 didn't work in his machine, despite them being composed of otherwise identical hardware.

I want to try updating the BIOS, but I am having trouble. I get cyclic redundancy errors when I try to burn a bootable disc. I can't find a flash drive < 2gb anywhere except in packs of 50 or more, to make a MS-DOS boottable flash drive (can't format it to FAT16 if it is > 2gb). The .bat files can't be run in a 64 bit environment either. So I could use a tip or two on how to try this to see if it helps.

I am open to suggestions. Also, I don't really know what I am doing, so any help at all is appreciated.

 

You don't need a flash drive under 2gb, and it doesn't need to be in FAT16. Use any flash drive and download Rufus. Format it in FAT32, and in the section where it asks for an ISO image, point it to the ISO file you download from Dell with the A09 BIOS.

http://rufus.akeo.ie/

Here's a link to the ISO (the first download link):

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverid=H9DY5

 

Hook up an external monitor; if it works then the 5850M is not dead, but the lcd might be (it's a non-optimus system, iirc). The white screen means the backlight is still functioning, so that's good, at least. With any luck it's just a bit of corrosion on the lcd's display connector; try electrical contact cleaner on both cable end and connector.

 

The LCD works fine because I am typing this reply by using it right now. It works with the Nvidia 240M.

Rufus gives an error when I point it to the ISO file. It says that it is unsupported because it is either un-bootable or using a boot or compression method that is unsupported.

 

Not necessarily. My 5850 does not display to the laptop's monitor but does work with an external monitor.

The problem is your 5850 card.

You are absolutely right. I just tried it and it gives me that error too. No worries, you can do it another way.

1- Run Rufus with your flash drive attached and in the "Create a bootable disk using" section, choose FreeDOS from the list. Remember that this will erase the contents of the drive.
2- Download the A09 BIOS in executable format:
http://downloads.dell.com/bios/R293649.exe
3- Run the executable, and extract the contents to the root of your USB flash drive. A folder called M15R1A09 will be created.
4- Shutdown and boot to your USB flash drive. At the DOS prompt navigate to the M15R1A09 folder on your USB flash drive (by typing cd m15r1a09). Once in that folder type f.bat to run the firmware update.