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General discussion

Dell Laptop Diagnostic CMOS Error 0212 due to Failsafe

by ronz--2008 Nov 16, 2009 6:00AM PST

After installation of Phoenix Failsafe, Dell's Diagnostics (press F12 on boot) may show a CMOS error 0212. I think it is a false error because Dell's diagnostic program does not recognize Failsafe in the BIOS. (I hope that is all it is.)

I learned this the hard way. I returned two Dell Inspiron 14z laptops to Best Buy because I thought they were faulty when I got error after running the diagnostics. On the third laptop, I noticed that Failsafe said something about BIOS when installing. After installing Failsafe and running Diagnostics, I got the error. I did not get the error before installing Failsafe.

I hope this info saves some of the frustrations like what I went through.
If anyone can further confirm this, I would feel better.

-Ron

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This reminds me of GoBack.

by r. proffitt Former Forum moderator Nov 19, 2009 12:43AM PST

That used to crash machines too. Or create issues when the user did that plus wanted to tinker with partitions later.

Let's chalk this up to "not everything works with everything." Now that you know the failsafe is not safe it's time to write it as something you can't use.

Let me part with something I am doing. I'm using CLONEZILLA to write an image of my hard drive to an external drive. Since that takes hours I schedule this for a time I can let it finish.
Bob

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