Dell has acknowledged a problem with the Optiplex 390 units going back to at least December of last year. The affected systems do not wake up from sleep mode even if powered off and back on. Some users are reporting up to 50% failure rate of systems after a week or two of use. At this point Dell has halted the shipping of this series until all units can be corrected, but third party resellers may be still selling stock on hand. If you already have units in production then you need to do the update to your systems before they start having the problem.

The affected systems can have any of the following symptoms: No POST after power applied – Some systems may exhibit a no POST symptom, especially after being normally shutdown and allowed to idle in the hibernate or off power states. The symptom is a brief power up with a momentary blue power LED and a solid amber diag LED 3 followed by an immediate shut down them. This problem is caused by the way the BIOS handles the deep sleep mode option. Under normal circumstances the machine will go to sleep and pressing the power button will wake it up but the flaw causes the system to not see the wake signal and sleep forever. Dell has a fix for the issue as follows:
First you will need to update the BIOS to A05, BIOS update available here
Once the update is complete you will need to go into the BIOS setup and change the deep sleep option under power management to disabled.
Update 2/22 9:45am:The BIOS A05 has the deep sleep option removed so once the BIOS update is complete you are finished and do not need ot make the change.
Update 2/21 10:40pm: If your systems are running BIOS version A01 then you need to update to A02 before you can update to A05. Here is the link to get the earlier version: Link to A02 download

If your system will not boot at all them follow these steps to try and get it to boot as per Dell tech support:
No POST after being powered on for some time -
The symptom is that the system will immediately shut down when the power button is pressed. The diagnostic LED 3 may stay illuminated momentarily during the failure. There is a solid workaround which is to change the BIOS setting for Deep Sleep to disable. Obviously to do this you must get the system to boot. So, in order to boot the system, remove the AC power and press the test button on the power supply for several seconds. Re-attach the AC power and attempt to power on. If this doesn’t work, you can remove the system lid, then remove the USBF1 connector from the motherboard (green connector near the PSU side of the motherboard). The system should POST with USBF1 removed. When the system does POST, hit F2 to enter the system setup menu, then find the deep sleep setting and set it to disable. Re-plug the USBF1 connector, and the issue should be cleared.

Here is a link to the Dell Tech Service Guide that shows where the USBF1 connectors are located if you are unable to locate them. The Tech guide covers all of the form factors from SFF to MT.
Let us know if you have affected systems and how many. We will update this story as we get more information on the issue so be sure to subscribe to this post to stay updated.

Updated 2/21 3:10pm > Here are some additional information links about this issue:
Dell forum post on Optiplex 390 SFF systems
Spiceworks community post on desktop models
Distribution “technical hold” posting

One Comment on Problems with the Dell Optiplex 390 systems

Anthony on Wed, 22nd Feb 2012 9:56 am


Note on the A05 version of the BIOS the option for deep sleep has been removed (at least I could not find it). So you might want to note that in the article.

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