Options with a bricked BIOS on a Dell XPS 13 9360

[firewolfsm]

I spent some time editing IFR values of the BIOS using UEFI shell, and successfully made some changes until, unfortunately, one particular change (GPU memory aperture size) bricked the laptop completely. Nothing can be displayed on the laptop, it cannot boot into bios recovery mode, and all combinations of unplugging the battery and CMOS battery and holding the power button have done nothing.

It does in fact turn on, and responds to a power off button press, but all it does is show a black screen and spin up the fan, also the keyboard backlight button doesn't work so I don't think it's posted in any way. It seems like one option is to solder on a new bios chip but I'm not entirely sure how that goes. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[LTC8K6]

Have you tried an external display?

 

[jana519]

You can't brick a BIOS from within the UEFI... So just pull the CMOS battery and let it sit overnight, so the settings return to default.

 

[firewolfsm]

It seems I have. I've cleared CMOS, tried the built in bios recovery, resetting the EC, nothing worked.

I did try an external display, no signal output, nice idea though.

 

[jana519]

My bad, thought UEFI BIOS and UEFI shell were synonymous. Yeah if you were running some external software you very likely bricked it. I can't help you much more, but I would definitely post on the Dell forums or Notebookcheck forums, they do IFR modifications over there. If there is a BIOS recovery utility for your model laptop they would know.

That would be easier than soldering a new chip.