Strange Dell Optiplex 390 problem!

[adhutton]

We have a strange problem with our Dell OptiPlex 390 PCs and I am wondering if anyone has come across this before?

 

Last week, a couple of our Dell OptiPlex 390 desktop PCs (which are just coming up to 3 years old) started to report they had no HDD and could not boot.

 

Ok, we thought, dead HDD.

 

However, upon running the diagnostics, the HDDs appear to be fine.

 

Then, a couple more OptiPlex 390s reported the same problem.

 

By Friday, we had about a dozen OptiPlex 390s with the same issue!!!

 

This cannot be just a hardware problem I thought - maybe a virus!!!

 

We have virus scanned the affected PCs (strangely they will still boot with a little coaxing), but that doesn't find any problems.

 

By this morning we have a few more around the school in the same state!!

 

Thankfully, we have a total mixture of Dell PC models, OptiPlex 380s, 390s, 755s, 3020s etc....only the Dell OptiPlex 390s seem to be affected at the moment!!!

Has anyone ever seen this or heard about this problem? Is this something like a boot sector virus???

 

Any help/suggestions greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers_

 

Andrew

[atso]

Hi

 

Have you tried to upgrade the bios, and check the batteries. We had a few dell PC that had same sort of problems. A bios update and a few new batteries sorted them out.

[sted]

they've not been switched back to uefi from legacy boot have they (or vice versa)?

[Sagima]

We recently purchased some kingston ssds and had that problem just in our 390s but replacing them with sandisks one removed the problem completely. Bios updates didn't help.

[adhutton]

Thank you for everyone's help with this.

 

We 'think' we have solved the issue!

 

It has been fixed by updating the BIOS on the affected PCs to the latest version.

 

We haven't been able to find any virus or anything else nasty and once the BIOS is updated they work correctly again.

 

It's just very strange how quite a few of them have all gone down at the same time!! Bizarre.

 

Andrew

[atso]

Glad to have helped you out :-)