I installed 16GB of ram into my Precision M6400 the other day and it things ran perfectly fine, until I had to force an ACPI shutdown by holding the power button.<\/p>\n
When I turned it back on, the progress bar on the BIOS’s POST (power on self test) screen (big dell logo) got stuck at about 80% and started crawling for about 15 minutes before it moved on with the boot process. In my case, it was to ask for a biometric verification. But since it took so long to start up, I went to go do something else. By the time I got back, the laptop had turned itself off again because no credentials were provided to continue the boot process. So I turned it on again and had to wait out the full 15 minutes.
\n
\nI figured that it had to do with the BIOS performing a full memory test. If the operating system boots up and shuts down properly, the BIOS will only perform a quick test and move on. In all other cases, a thorough test will be performed to ensure functional RAM. Unfortunately, large RAM sizes make this thorough test incredibly lengthy, even though your RAM may be perfectly fine.<\/p>\n
There is a BIOS setting that allows you to choose between “Auto”, “Minimal”, and “Thorough”, but in reality “Auto” and “Minimal” are the same thing – I still have mine set to “Minimal” and it runs into the full memory test whenever the BIOS detects an abnormal shutdown.<\/p>\n
I performed memory tests later, using memtest86+, to rule out memory issues. The RAM passed 100%. After being fed up with the nonsense memory check the BIOS seems to have a fetish for, I started to hunt for solutions. Out of a combination of disassembling the BIOS, Google-ing, and contacting Dell’s tech support (which didn’t help at all), I found that you can press the space bar during that full memory test and it will bypass it for you.<\/p>\n
Again, this is undocumented, except for 1 or 2 very old forum posts out there that suggested this workaround for much older models. Apparently it still works. So the next time you get stuck, try pressing that space bar.<\/p>\n
Now Dell, why wouldn’t you tell your customers about this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I installed 16GB of ram into my Precision M6400 the other day and it things ran perfectly fine, until I had to force an ACPI shutdown by holding the power button. When I turned it back on, the progress bar on the BIOS’s POST (power on self test) screen (big dell logo) got stuck at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,15],"tags":[93,32,31,94,96,99,97,98,30,101,100,95],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-tips","category-tutorials","tag-bios","tag-dell","tag-m6400","tag-memory","tag-memtest86","tag-on","tag-post","tag-power","tag-precision","tag-ram","tag-self","tag-test"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":127,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions\/127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmach.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}