Hello,
I purchased this Dell laptop last year and apart from initially having to have a Dell service engineer replace the keyboard and screen it has worked fine.
Today I tried to disable UEFI boot (which I had done before without issue), I enabled legacy boot, this is a Windows 8.1 machine.
Now when I turn on the computer this is what happens:
Dell logo shows briefly with press F2, F12 (I have tried pressing each separately and it won't enter the BIOS) edit: forgot to say, after I press F2 or F12 it shows the onscreen button as highlighted (so the keyboard is working, as does numlock) but it doesn't enter the BIOS menu, something to do with this legacy boot.
"pxe exiting pxe rom"
"operation system not found"
"No boot device found press any key to reboot the machine"
I can see the boot order is set wrong because of this legacy mode, it is trying to boot by ethernet cable, if I plug in an ethernet cable I get a different message where it waits for DHCP host to boot, but this is not possible as have booted from HDD previously.
I have ran the Dell diagnostic test and it shows no errors (as this is a software problem).
Since I cannot enter the BIOS menu for some unknown reason, I can't change the setting back to UEFI.
I would normally try a DVD/CD recovery but this laptop has no disk drive, I would also create a bootable USB to repair but since I can't access the BIOS I can't change the boot order to choose to boot from USB.
Could someone tell me if the BIOS memory is volatile or non-volatile, as it may be possible to resolve this issue by removing the CMOS battery so that the BIOS returns to default settings and back to UEFI.
I have tried to look up the chipset (as far as I can tell the I5-4200U is integrated with the motherboard, but I haven't found out online if the motherboard has a jumper to reset (it's not mentioned in the lacklustre manual) and I don't know if the EEPROM has a flash memory or if it will be wiped by the battery being removed, which would be useful...
Please help, Thank you.
