Older Dell's with a corrupt BIOS and the motherboard is "toast".   The BIOS chip could be replaced, but you would need a good BIOS chip from another exact motherboard and that is iffy at best, desoldering and resoldering could zap the chip or cause damage to the printed circuits on the board. The Dell cases are not complete ATX standard so fitting a non Dell, or even a different model Dell motherboard is a challenge.  Dell uses partial motherboard hole standards, the rear motherboard I/O shield is built into the case on many.  Front panel connections are proprietary and undocumented and varies from model to model. The remaining components, such as optical drives can be reused.  Hard drives can be reused, although SSD drives are becoming the "standard".  The power supply is custom and considering the age of the XPS435 its not a good candidate for reuse.  Case fans are another Dell custom item.  For the price of a standard case, don't even consider reusing the Dell case.
So SupportAssist said I needed to do a BIOS update. I followed the instructions to get it going and once it was started I walked away for the night while it did it's thing. In the morning the computer was off. Once starting it all I see is a black screen. Powering off/on has no affect other than to start the fans running. There are no beeps or messages displayed, in fact the monitor just goes into power save mode. I concluded that the BIOS update failed and bricked my motherboard, I angerly ordered another computer, took the hard drive out of the bricked one and threw it into the new computer so I wouldn't lose personal stuff. I ended up losing some purchased software but no big deal. I then packed the old computer away hoping to someday do something with it when I had the time. What I would like to know; is this motherboard truly bricked or is there someway of reviving the BIOS?  I have read many different discussions about some motherboards having a BIOS jumper that will force the BIOS into loading a protected code to get it going again, as well as others saying it's dead-give up-move on. The problem I have with giving up is that there is the video card, ram, DVD burner, and other components plus the huge case that I do not want to scrap. So I want to either get the BIOS going again on this computer or using everything that's left to add to another motherboard. Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks.
Studio XPS 435T, BIOS fail