I own a Dell Inspiron 7720 laptop. A few days ago, I got a suggestion from a Dell program to update my BIOS, which I allowed. The update didn't seem to bring up any additional windows or a progress bar to let me know how the update was going but I didn't think too much of it and let the computer do its thing.
Generally I just leave my laptop on nonstop and put it to sleep whenever it's not being used (I remember reading somewhere on the Windows 8 user start guide to just let it sleep instead of turning it off). Yesterday, I traveled home for Thanksgiving while my laptop was in sleep mode. When I tried to turn on my laptop, I noticed it was no longer in sleep mode and had turned off instead. No big deal, I thought, but when I turned it on, I got an error screen along the lines of
PXE-### Media test failure, check cable
PXE-###: Exiting Intel PXE ROM
I was left at the boot screen, which allowed me to run the diagnostics. I let it run and came across the error code 2000-0332 in the pre-boot assessment screen, which told me something was wrong with my video card memory (video memory integrity test discrepancy). Upon a little bit of research on this code, it may have something to do with my BIOS and that I should try to flash it. However I haven't been able to do this through the USB (I get the error "invalid or damaged bootable partition" when I leave the USB stick in on startup) nor the CD (doesn't seem the .exe on the CD is detected).
I tried getting to the BIOS screen by pressing F2 at the Dell logo but I always end up at the same screen which lists me my legacy boot options (I don't get the typical BIOS screens that lets me change my default settings, boot order, etc). The listed choices were Removable Drive, CD/DVD/CD-RW drive, Second Hard Drive, and Network. Pressing F12 does the same thing. I noticed that primary hard drive isn't listed so I though maybe something was wrong with my HD, but the pre-boot assessment shows that it is working fine.
I'm really out of ideas on what to do. If worst comes to worst, I can try to exchange it for another since I'm still within the exchange period but I would rather keep my current laptop and its information.