On power-up the DEL key takes you into the BIOS. If you're prompted for a password the old Wyse password of Fireport still works on these modern thin clients.
The early (2014) version BIOS identified itself as:
WYSE Dell Wyse Thin Client Desktop 3290/Dell Wyse Thin Client Desktop 3290, BIOS 1.0B 07/11/2014
whilst the later 3030LT
WYSE Dell Wyse Thin Client Desktop 3030 LT/007MXD, BIOS 1.0C 07/25/2016
Putting the Service Tag for the 3030 LT into the Dell Support web site showed that it was still in (basic) warranty and been shipped running the 'ThinLinux' operating system.
At the time of writing (November 2019) the 'Drivers and Downloads' tab on the Wyse support site showed:
With a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer pen drive plugged the Boot Tab listed:
Any pendrives you have plugged in will appear under the USB HDD entry provided you have gone to the Advanced tab and set the option Boot from USB to 'Enabled'.
You can also bring up a one-time boot menu without fiddling with the BIOS settings:
This brings up the Boot Menu. In my case it showed:
The cursor up and cursor down keys let you pick what you want to boot.
The Tab key switches you between the Boot menu and the App menu. In my case there is just one entry in the App menu - Setup - which is the standard BIOS Setup utility.
Although the 3290 and 3030LT use a common hardware base the BIOSs are distinctly different and reflect the actual hardware options fitted to the motherboard. The 3290 BIOS supports the mSATA socket but does not have any support for the eMMC memory.
Conversely the 3030LT has support for the eMMC memory but does not support the mSATA socket.
If you fit the mSATA socket to a 3030LT you will need to install a 3290 BIOS and, as a result, the eMMC flash memory will vanish.
At the end of May 2022 I heard from Lucian who reported that:
Just an update regarding to N03D BIOS version available on the Dell site. It seems that the latest W7 image updates the BIOS to:
DMI: WYSE Dell Wyse Thin Client Desktop 3290/Dell Wyse Thin Client Desktop 3290, BIOS 1.0R 12/22/2017The older BIOS seems to have some issue with UEFI mode. With Linux I found that following a reboot it always hung.
Checking the Dell support site and typing in the Service Tag of my N03D (would have WES7 on it if the vendor hadn't stripped out the mini mSATA flash drive) it identified it as a 3030 and I found amongst the list the following downloads of interest:
The former was BEB0_7092_16gb.exe, a 10GB download. I downloaded both these files.
I have recently updated my Windows box and now have a SFF Dell Optiplex 3070 running 64-bit Windows 11.
Installing the USB imaging tool failed due to the lack of version 3.5 of the .NET framework. Having installed that it installed but then I had my standard experience of the imaging tool not recognising ANY USB drives of mine.
At this point I switched to my 32-bit Windows 7 setup and had no problems producing a bootable USB set up to push just the BIOS image onto my 3030.
This booted and ran and finally stopped with a text box in the middle of the screen saying Reading Flash Size Failed (error code 301).
I rebooted the unit and found everything was fine and that the BIOS had been updated to 1.0R.
The update process ran without errors on a couple of other units I have. It just so happens the first unit I picked up had no flash installed. The others had 8GB or 4GB mSATA drives installed. I assume the lack of flash storage (and OS) is what generated the apparent error.
[May 2022] My example of the 3030 LT was running BIOS 1.0C dated 07/05/2016 and was running ThinLinux. Having typed in the Service Tag Dell's support site did not offer any BIOS updates. If I changed the OS to 'ThinOS' it did offer a BIOS download in the form of U10_bios.bin. The installation instructions for this assumed that you were running the Wyse Management infrastructure.
As my unit was (nominally) running ThinLinux and I also have no Wyse Management infrastructure in place I left it alone.
In March 2023 I heard from Dave who had followed the approach documented for the Z90 which describes how to extract the Wyse BIOS programming tool from Wyse USB Imaging tool.
I was able to successfully use the instructions in the Z90 entry to update the BIOS on my Dell WYSE N03D/3030 thin clients. Finding the BIOS image itself was basically the same process as described there, as was extracting the LinFlash utilities, but instead of LinFlash, I had to use LinFlash32_4MB to flash the BIOS image. Worked like a charm.
In May 2023 I heard from Linus who noted that flashrom worked on the 3290/3030. Thanks to his email I discovered that on Intel architectures the BIOS flash memory is also associated with a separate 'Management Engine' (ME) and as a result has various quirks such as being divided into regions some of which are inaccessible from the PC. If you try a conventional flashrom read or write it will fail with a 'Transaction error'.
The correct syntax is:
sudo flashrom -p internal --ifd -i bios -r filenameand
sudo flashrom -p internal --ifd -i bios -w filename --noverify-all
The extra parameters are:
| --ifd | Read the ROM layout from an Intel Firmware descriptor |
| -i bios | Only flash the image bios from the flash layout |
| --noverify-all | Only verify the region selected from the flash layout |
If you have any interest adding the parameter -VV shows additional information some of which is abstracted below:
..... DMI string system-manufacturer: "WYSE" DMI string system-product-name: "Dell Wyse Thin Client Desktop 3030 LT" DMI string system-version: "Rev 1" DMI string baseboard-manufacturer: "Dell Inc." DMI string baseboard-product-name: "007MXD" DMI string baseboard-version: "A00" Found chipset "Intel Bay Trail" with PCI ID 8086:0f1c. ...... 0x54: 0x00000000 FREG0: Flash Descriptor region (0x00000000-0x00000fff) is read-only. 0x58: 0x07ff0400 FREG1: BIOS region (0x00400000-0x007fffff) is read-write. 0x5C: 0x03ff0001 FREG2: Management Engine region (0x00001000-0x003fffff) is locked. 0x60: 0x00001fff FREG3: Gigabit Ethernet region is unused. 0x64: 0x00001fff FREG4: Platform Data region is unused. Not all flash regions are freely accessible by flashrom. This is most likely due to an active ME. Please see https://flashrom.org/ME for details. ...... Reading flash descriptors mapped by the chipset via FDOC/FDOD... done. ...... === Content Section === ...... --- Details --- Region 0 (Descr. ) 0x00000000 - 0x00000fff Region 1 (BIOS ) 0x00400000 - 0x007fffff Region 2 (ME ) 0x00001000 - 0x003fffff ...... This chip may contain one-time programmable memory. flashrom cannot read and may never be able to write it, hence it may not be able to completely clone the contents of this chip (see man page for details). ...... Assuming chipset 'Baytrail'. Using region: "bios".
The flash chip is 8MB with the BIOS region being in the upper 4MB.
My 3030 LT was originally running ThinLinux.
My 3290 came without an SSD, but would have been running WES7.