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Optiplex 9010 Mini Tower - BIOS boot taking forever
The CR2032 battery on the mother board died which caused me to lose all of my BIOS settings. I replaced that battery so it once again remembers the BIOS settings but the machine now takes several minutes to get through the BIOS boot until it gets to the Windows boot. I've played around with several BIOS settings but haven't figured out why the BIOS boot is taking so long.
Any ideas on what BIOS settings I could change to get back to a decent BIOS boot time?
c.ortiz1216
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December 14th, 2023 17:05
I'm having a similar problem.
Here is the backstory: I have a computer lab at work with 25 Dell Optiplex 9010 SFF desktops. I recently replaced all of the HDD with SSD and used UEFI instead of Legacy (HDD was using Legacy). Everything was working perfectly until I noticed some machines would boot with a message that said the configuration was wrong. To fix it I would have to go into BIOS and switch it back to UEFI. I realized the CMOS batter was probably dying and kept forgetting that I had set it to boot in UEFI.
Fast forward a bit and now when I manage to get into bios (hit or miss) and switch it to UEFI the computer won't boot. It turns on the power LED is white no beeps or anything indicating there is an error. After a couple of minutes, it tries to boot again but takes forever to even boot into BIOS.
I have tried replacing the CMOS battery and unplugging everything (SSD, PSU, RAM, etc.) with nothing to work. What I'm going to try next is to re-image all of them with Legacy (MBR) instead of UEFI (GPT) to see if that fixes the issue. I will let you know if I have any success.
(edited)
c.ortiz1216
7 Posts
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December 15th, 2023 22:00
I have some good news and bad news. I have managed to fix 2 of 5 desktops with this problem. After replacing the CMOS battery and powering the machine, I was not getting the Dell logo, just a black screen. The power LED is white but that's about it.
I took the whole computer apart and disconnected everything inside including RAM, SSD, DVD, etc. I also removed the CMOS battery and pushed the power button to drain out the capacitors. After about a minute I put everything back together. Powered it on and it still black screen.
I left the computer on and after about 15-20 minutes the machine finally showed some text saying the configuration was wrong. At this point, I went into BIOS and put the machine on Legacy boot mode. I put in a Windows ISO and re-imaged the computer using Legacy (MBR) mode. Now the computer is working properly and is no longer getting stuck with a black screen.
The bad news is I have 3 computers in which I did the same steps and still can't get them to boot into anything.
I just ordered a BIOS programmer on Amazon. I'm gonna try to read the BIOS from one of the computers that are working using Legacy mode and then write that profile to the ones that won't turn on. I will let you guys know if I have any success with that.
RoHe
10 Elder
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43.7K Posts
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December 18th, 2023 20:39
@c.ortiz1216 - How is SATA Operation set in BIOS setup? There are possible 4 choices.
When you remove the motherboard battery, you reset BIOS to all its default values, but the Optiplex 9010 service manual doesn't say which SATA Operation setting is the default. It's possible that default setting, whichever it is, isn't correct for your setups.
I suspect you need AHCI, and it may have defaulted to ATA. So I'd check that before doing anything else. (Avoid trying RAID, unless your hardware and Windows have specifically been set up to use RAID.)
I'd test this on only one of the three systems, and if that works, try it on the next one...