Dell XPS 15 (9550) list of hardware and software problems

if you can get into the BIOS, F12, down once and enter then you have to hit the restore button at the bottom of the screen, it's about 2 inch to the right of the dell logo and about half inch up, that brings up the selection screen where defaults the selected option will do it and I assume hitting enter closes with an OK, after that hit exit about an inch in from the right edge.

Really hard to walk anyone through it, does it work with an external monitor hooked up, even a TV via HDMI will do it?

Dell will send a tech with motherboard normally or replace with another outlet model but no one to dates had a brand new in place of an outlet model on here afaik

 

let me try hooking up to my tv real quick and see if that works at all.

 

okay, i plugged in an hdmi cable but i'm not sure how to force output to it. i'm hitting the f8 key and it's not shifting it over.

 

I don't know if it will but normally they light up after its POSTed so making an attempt to get into the selection screen/BIOS may be enough (slapping F12)

If you feel brave enough to take the base off you can pull the battery and press power up to discharge it and try again?

 

unfortunately not. i'm in the bios screen right now (with my about an inch sliver of visible screen) and hitting the monitor output button does nothing. i think at this point i may as well give up. i can't read anything well enough to guess at trying to reset the bios.

 

that probably would have been my second or third choice if i actually had the tools to do it. unfortunately i don't own a torx screwdriver. would it overall be worth it to try to fix everything myself or should i just see what dell support can do at this point?

 

If you don't have the tools then Dell, but watch them like a hawk!

Any use?

 

unfortunately i have the fhd model so that won't work for me, haha.

 

yeah, so they're shipping me a box to ship it to a repair depot... they're claiming it's an lcd issue but given that the screen diagnostic works fine, i don't see how that's the case. anyway, we'll see how it goes... if i get it back "repaired" and i still can't update any drivers without fear of blue screens then i'm just either gonna have to request a refund or exchange or something.

also, after rewatching that video, is there no key i can hit to bring up the restore defaults menu and then just hit enter from there?

 

Nothing I am aware of, fek, forgot you have no touch panel!

 

haha, oh well... i mean i feel like this is kind of fruitless... maybe i win the lottery and get a slightly more functional laptop when it comes back but this is the second time now i've had an issue with blue screens and my system being unresponsive. the first was after i tried installing the synaptics touchpad driver to see if it'd improve my touchpad experience but then it immediately blue screened... i ended up being able to restore my last backup image and it went fine. then the same thing... drivers... restart... blue screen... but clearly much worse this time.

i've never gone through a warranty return/repair before, but could they try to make claims against any repair for doing things like undervolting and the like?

 

also if anyone is up for it, maybe they could go into the bios and tell me how many clicks down it would take for me to reset to bios defaults? probably won't solve anything at this point but i figure anything is worth a shot. i know it'll probably be annoying to calculate exactly how to reset with just keyboard but i'd appreciate it.

EDIT:

so with the amount of screen i could see, i decided to change boot mode to legacy and now i can actually see the screen! but it says that boot media is missing? just wondering what steps i can make from here possibly.

 

No not at all, they are not that clever for a start. Undervolting happens after it's booted!

 

check above, i edited it to say that i switched to legacy boot with secure boot off. when it booted up though it says selected boot device failed when trying to boot from the ssd. windows boot manager also says that the boot configuration data for your pc is missing or contains errors.

but now i can't access the bios at all.

since i disabled the usb at your suggestion, gonzo, am i out of luck to try to boot from win 10 usb to try to repair the boot record?

 

okay, so this will be my last post for a while until response since i don't wanna flood the thread, but i did get the laptop working with my tv. funny thing is, it still shows the fuzzy rainbow pixelated stuff, so it's clearly not an lcd issue, but software.

so on legacy boot/no secure boot, i can't access bios at all that way. just a black blank screen. same with uefi boot/no secure boot. uefi boot/secure boot lets me access the bios but it's with the fuzzy stuff and i can't see well enough to do anything.

since i disabled usb before, i can't boot from my usb stick to possibly repair the boot configuration.

only options left for me i think are to proceed with the dell repair or to go buy some tools to get in and remove the cmos battery.

 

It's definitely not software since it happens in the BIOS. You've got a hardware problem.

 

i suppose so, yeah. i'm just tired of not being able to update any drivers without something crazy happening. this is the second time in the less than a week i've owned the laptop.

 

Sorry to hear this. Hope you get it resolved quickly and fairly. I think a replacement laptop would be a fair request, perhaps with some upgrade.

Speaking on the phone to a manager generally gets me better results than email, chatting, etc...

 

Yeah, I didn't really want to press the issue with him. I asked once and he said no, I'm going to give the repair depot one more shot before I start getting upset.

Yeah I remember when they finally made your situation right, you went through a lot more than I have. I will ask for the resolution team if this laptop is FUBAR again. Funny thing is I did dell contract work back in the day, I would have never even thought about sending something like that back to a customer. I know stuff happens, but those were pretty glaring issues to me.

I hope they do make it right for me. At first they were trying to get me to just live with the broken stand off, I told him that I wanted the laptop to be fixed properly.

The best part of this whole thing is that it's dell premiere service, whatever that means. All I know is a 7 business day turn around time isn't exactly stellar by any means.

 

A lot happens during a nights sleep!

Secure boot cannot be seen by legacy i'm afraid, no USB will fix without a format (someone did get macrium to get round it though)

At least it is constructive flooding
If you can be arsed to pickup a T5 torx and don't mind removing the battery or worst taking the board out to get the the CMOS battery then it is worth a shot as you will no doubt take more care than a Dell tech

It is looking that way but a couple of users have reset the BIOS, the whole bit about not being able to F12 into the BIOS is troubling though.

It isn't right and a fresh install may fix the driver update but as above it is starting to manifest as a serious hardware issue.

Even if it is an outlet laptop as a new will not be authorised for an outlet one, otherwise new for new no excuses now.

I have found you have to be very firm with the phone support to get what you want, if you get no joy off the support rep then the line manager who are normally as useless as the rep you spoke to. In the UK you get assigned a rep and he will see the case through and it is on his back to resolve it. Once it got to the 4th laptop that was refused I went to resolutions and argued that I was receiving defective laptops and reporting them upon arrival and initial inspection so how could that count towards me triggering the "refund him and fek him off" policy. Start *****ing that they are costing you considerable time and money, you paid on a credit card and will involve them for a full refund if needs be. It does get you a better service!

 

i'm considering it. i was gonna buy a torx set anyway to do the repaste/thermal pad thing at some point. but they're also already in the process of sending me the box to ship the laptop to the repair depot. maybe i can get lucky and get an upgrade on whatever they send me back but based on most of the thread i would say that might be asking too much...

i'm also still wondering if anyone would take the time out to maybe see if there's a way for me to use my keyboard to reactivate the usb and see if the windows recovery media can help me out.

 

Once in the bios press down 6 times, enter, down 4 times, enter, press tab then enter, escape, enter. It should reboot

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(edit now back on the laptop)

that allowed me to disable the USB so it should work in reverse. Or enable god mode.

 

once in the BIOS press tab twice then enter twice, if it reboots you just reset the BIOS to default!

 

thanks for the help! i got the usb activated. problem is, it won't boot in uefi/no secure boot or legacy/no secure boot. i burned your iso using gpt at first and then mbr and still says no boot media or something like that. is it only possible to boot windows 10 now with secure boot? if so, i need a way to blindly change the boot order to the external usb stick using the same down down down tab enter method if you're up to it, haha. we'll see if that works or not... if not i'll try resetting the bios and see what happens then. probably nothing but eh.

 

can you not get to the f12 boot selection menu without the pixels issue as you can change secure boot there?

Also did you do a bios reset with tab tab enter enter? that alone will restore secure boot.

 

whenever secure boot is activated it does the pixels/can't see anything issue. and default boot sequence is set to windows boot manager as first option so.

i can get to the f12 boot selection menu, but as i said, the legacy/no secure boot and uefi/no secure boot options give an error when trying to boot from the usb stick.

 

hmm, that Rufus method will work on either, how annoying. Try a rufus with the combined partition scheme, let it use NTFS if it wants as it doesn't matter outside secure boot what format it is in. See if that gets it going as F12 should sow the USB stick so changing it in the BIOS won't make it work. I have a fair chunk of stuff going off so I can't reboot for a little while so I would change the USB to MBR from GPT?

 

well i originally had it with gpt and it wasn't showing up on the boot options for either legacy or uefi with no secure boot. then i tried again with mbr and it did show up but wouldn't actually boot from it when i tried from the boot options menu.

 

down x3 tab enter esc enter will remove windows boot manager form the sequence allowing the secondary.

 

okay, so resetting the bios to default actually lets me boot up now but clearly something got messed up with my hard drive because it's not even detecting a drive anymore. what is my best option here? given that when the problems first started, i tried restoring from my macrium reflect backup images and that didn't really help at all. as a matter of fact, it may be what is causing most of my issues.

i'm trying to rebuild the bcd, but there's not even a bcd in my c:\boot... and only a macrium folder. any ideas on how to proceed?

 

why not boot macrium and restore the initial image and the incrementals as I thought that was the best way to get back to where you were before things went fubar?


My understanding is you take an initial full backup then weekly differentials and a daily incremental, the idea is to restore the main image, then the latest differential and incrementals in order to get you back. So you should need to restore the main backup and all the incrementals to get back to the last backup you took. Long winded I know but that's my understanding of macrium.

Can you see the screen now it has reset the BIOS and secure boot on etc?

 

yeah, i can see everything. the bios reset fixed all that. now i'm just trying to get windows to boot again. trying to rebuild bcd through command prompt but no luck.

when i originally ran into problems, that's what i did with macrium. when you restore the latest incremental it also restores the full backup too. but i think somehow that messed things up and i don't know why.

 

in the macrium recovery environment have you tried the restore tab then fix windows boot problems?

 

i'll try that, i'll just have to burn the macrium recovery onto my usb stick.

 

now i'm having an issue where my usb won't show up on boot options, haha. i think i'm slowly getting to solving this but roadblocks along the way.

 

If you're in secure boot the USB must be as well?
Macrium does work for me but sometimes I ave to use the right USB port for it to play nice.

 

I got some luck by soft resetting the BIOS 3-4 times (press the "power button" + f2 to get into BIOS. Then click restore settings). Doing that a few times seemed to get things back on track.

I think someone mentioned here that trying different USB ports was helpful. On mine, the right hand USB port was the "dominant" one and worked more often than the left one.

You might run the short and extended ePSA diagonistics for fun (press the "power button" +f12 then select the diagnostics-enter)

FYI - after initial start-up when things were not working properly, the function keys haphazardly required hitting the fn key to work (e.g. fn+f12)

Finally, some people reported disconnecting the battery helped (takes 2 minutes but you need a t5 and smaller Phillips screwdriver). Removing the CMOS battery also might help but that is a bit more work on the 9550 (although I read about a less difficult removal process somewhere here). Disconnecting the battery never helped me and I did not try to remove the well-hidden CMOS battery

 

I have an interesting problem.

I have an external SSD disk drive and it works perfectly for a while until my event viewer starts logging things such as:
"Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort8, was issued."
"The IO operation at logical block address 0x5d4528 for Disk 1 (PDO name: \Device\00000098) was retried."

Anything using this disk then becomes unresponsive. Are there any known issues regarding this?

Not sure if it could be a chipset problem, I hadn't touched the device itself - I was just transferring large amounts of data to it.
This is the device: http://www.inateck.com/inateck-automatic-usb-3-0-enclosure-sata-ssd-fe2006/

Edit: it has a Sandisk 250gb X110 in it.

 

so i can't get my reflect backups to boot no matter what. would i be better off to just clean install and then try to restore my backup from there?

 

tbh due to the issues you had I would go down that path, even if it just to get to desktop and install the macrium environment to dual boot then restore that way.

As it has had 2 issues updating personally I would do a clean install and grab documents from the macrium images so you avoid repeating the problem again!

 

i'm giving it one last go. i wiped my drive and will restore and see what happens then. if not, i'll just clean install from scratch, try a restore to see if i can recover my files once my boot issues are sorted and if not, i'll just start over. i did receive my box from dell support today to ship to the repair depot but i'm probably just going to keep the laptop and then just complain to customer service to see if i can get some sort of refund (i hear they're pretty likely to give a 10% refund) or maybe an exchange/upgrade if i'm vehement enough about it. the issues with the laptop so far are not very fun.

 

so i clean installed, then tried restoring image from macrium. once again won't boot. i'm convinced now that the issue is with reflect. am i missing something about the restore process?

 

Something must have gone wrong with the image?

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well, i'm hoping i found the solution. we'll see, but i was looking online and someone was talking about how they couldn't get one of their backups to boot because it was restoring with the partitions out of order... the correct order is supposed to be: system, msr, windows, recovery... but my backup was restoring as recovery, system, msr, windows. so i'm restoring it now with the correct order. if this doesn't work, then i guess what i'm gonna do is clean install and then just restore my c: drive/windows partition and leave the system/recovery/msr alone.

 

to be fair the just the c drive should be enough?
The rest are the same. (should be)

 

Anyone else feel like they could open up a PC repair shop after owning one of these?

I'm a thermal, data recovery, ssd, driver bug, and keyboard service ****ing expert.

 

Yeah, safest to just restore the os partition

 

Ditto, preferably right next door to me.....

 

so hopefully anyone can help me... hopefully someone with more experience with macrium.

so when i did my macrium setup, i chose incremental backups. that means the initial full backup plus incrementals every day.

so far i've tried all these different options to restore:

1. copy over every partition from my backup
2. delete partitions, then copy over every partition
3. clean install windows, then copy over every partition
4. clean install windows, then copy over just the os partition

every single one has failed. i've been restoring from a networked drive... could that potentially cause any problems? should i hook up directly next time?

and am i missing something about restoring? i restore from the latest incremental, which as far as i can tell does also look at the data from the full backup and then restores the subsequent incrementals as well but maybe i've misread. i just would like to be able to get all my programs/files back rather than starting clean.

also if it helps to troubleshoot, the first option and i believe the 3rd option end up with every partition available. but when i do 2 and 4, when i'm back in the rescue environment and do diskpart/list volumes, there's only a c: partition which says it's for macrium and then the recovery and system partitions. so obviously something is going wrong there.