Dell Vostro suddenly giving "No TPM or TPM has..." message on boot

Question

(Original question title was Dell Vostro suddenly giving "No TPM or TPM has problem" message on boot" but I was pinged by the stack exchange style police for having the word "problem" in my title!)

I have a Dell Vostro 1510 laptop which spontaneously decided it wouldn't boot. I get a message

No TPM or TPM has problem

It was working until then, and nothing in particular was installed/done to it. TPM was not in use AFAIK.

I have succeeded in booting with a CD recovery Linux disk that has enabled me to mount the internal C:\ drive and copy my stuff to a USB drive, so the stuff is not encrypted.

With a new disk in I still get the message on boot. Although Linux can see the disk, if I boot with a Windows XP disk, it can't see the new disk so I can't partition it/format it/install XP.

I can't find any option in the BIOS to disable the TPM.

My question is (obviously!):

What can I do?

TIA, R

Answer 1

Sounds like the TPM chip has failed. You can try clearing the cmos by removing the RTC battery for a few minutes, be sure to set date and time in the bios after doing this.

Source of information