One of my favorite things to do is to take old hardware and resurrect it for general purpose. Case in point: I was given an old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop which was determined to be "non-functional." After a little poking around, I determined that it had a dead hard drive and dead cd-rom drive. I talked to a few friends who have 'junk drawers' full of Dell parts and they found me a replacement cd-rom drive from a slim-line Dell desktop (I just remounted it in the laptop bracket,) an old 40GB IDE HDD, 2 x 256 MB sticks of PC133 RAM (literally the only type of RAM this thing will accept,) and an old Dell C/Dock (Model PRX.) I installed all of the parts and got her to boot Ubuntu 8.04 Server beautifully. What a success! Then came time to attach it to the dock. Well, this line of laptop was obviously not meant to attach to this line of dock because there is a metal arm with a hook coming off the dock that is meant to slide into the back of the laptop and lock. Lo and behold there was a metal plate in the way. A little further investigation revealed that this plate is removable by first removing the plastic plate above the keyboard (nearest to the LCD) which in itself is as easy as pulling up on it (it has plastic clips underneath that release easily.) When you remove it, the metal plate comes up with it and is easily removed by unscrewing two small screws. Viola! Just replace the plastic panel and you're ready to go....until you dock the laptop and try to boot. Oh no! It tells you that your laptop is not compatible with this dock (or some mumbo jumbo akin to that,) and that you need to remove it to avoid damage. Yea right! How did the laptop decide this? Easy, it compares the BIOS to the accepted BIOSes for the dock and realizes that your laptop doesn't have that. The dock was designed (meant to be sold to) for the Lattitude C series notebooks. So what do you do now? Why flash the BIOS to the compatible Lattitude C series notebook of course.
Here is a list for the compatible versions:
- Inspiron 3700 - Latitude CPxH BIOS
- Inspiron 3800 - Latitude CPxJ BIOS
- Inspiron 4000 - Latitude C600 BIOS
- Inspiron 4100 - Latitude C610 BIOS
- Inspiron 4150 - Latitude C640 BIOS
- Inspiron 8000 - Latitude C800 BIOS
- Inspiron 8100 - Latitude C810 BIOS
- Inspiron 8200 - Latitude C840 BIOS
The notebook is going to complain that it isn't the right version yadda yadda yadda. It's going to fail and send you to the A:/ prompt. Perfect!
Now type: C810_A12 /jabil (replacing the C810_A12 with the exe you found for your model) and hit Enter.
It will then say: About to flash Latitude C810 BIOS on Inspiron 8100. Are you sure? (again with whatever model you chose) Just type "yes" and hit Enter.
The unit should reboot now and it should say "Lattitude" on the splash screen where it used to say Inspiron. If you see this you have succeeded!
If you didn't get asked to flash the Lattitude BIOS over the Inspiron one, try this:
Type: C810_A12 /forceit /forcetype (again C810_A12 can be any model you chose)
That should do it! Plug the laptop back into the dock and reboot. There should be no more compatibility message. If you have any questions, drop me a comment and I'll try to help you out as much as I can. Good luck!
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