How to reset bios in my Inspiron 3800 laptop?

[ironmanmlr]

Hello,

I recently installed a new harddrive, batteries, and ram into my Dell Inspiron 3800 laptop and now I cannot get into bios. I press F2 at intial startup and it goes to the intial bios screen and freezes. Will not do anything. I have to power off and restart. In all other ways it works just fine. I tried removing the batteries and going back to the original ram and it does the same thing. I changed the jumper on the harddrive to cable select and it started asking for a password to access the harddrive. I put the jumper back to master and the computer starts, but still cannot get into bios.

 

[buwish]

By batteries, do you mean the CMOS battery? If you haven't removed the CMOS battery, try doing so for at least 30 seconds and putting it back in. See if it lets you in then. If not, I would recommend either updating or re-installing the BIOS from Dell's website, as it may reset the bios and allow you back in. Just make sure that you have everything backed up, as there is always the chance that doing so could brick the darn thing. If that is a no go, I'd contact Dell's technical support and see what they have to say. Usually they have a specific work around for such matters that at least I am unaware of.

 

[ironmanmlr]

Thanks for the reply buwish.

Not the CMOS battery. The standard laptop batteries. I don't know where the CMOS battery is on this laptop to remove it. I have already attempted re-installing the bios. Unfortunately the harddrive is considered third party hardware. I have posted on the Dell forum and got no reply.

Mike