In my enthusiasm to upgrade the WLAN to a non-whitelisted card, I've messed up my BIOS and need help recovering. I found a F.0D version with whitelisting removed on this website and flashed my laptop to it. The flash programming and verification were reported as successful by Windows and the machine restarted but would not boot. CapsLock flashes slowly and the WiFi button is a steady amber. Since I had read about this possibility, I tried to reboot into Recovery mode by holding down the Windows+B while pressing the power button; same result. I created a USB stick with the HP UEFI Support Environment tool and copied the relevant .bin and .sig file from the original F.0D BIOS file to the Hewlett-Packward\BIOS\Current folder on the USB stick, inserted it into the laptop, held down Windows+B and powered on; same result. Now I'm panicking. Any thoughts on other things to try? Thanks.
I should add that I started with the names 68PFU.bin and 68PFU.sig based on what was extracted from HP's sp51359.exe but later also tried renaming them to 3634.bin and 3536.sig since that is the platform number. In all these cases, the USB activity light blinks a few times and stops. Thanks.
Taking the main battery and AC cord out and holding the power button down for 10 seconds does not seem to make a difference. Is there a better way to reset the CMOS in a laptop? Thanks.
I found instructions online to remove the RTC battery, took out the hard drive and held the power button down to clear the CMOS. Reinserted the battery and the hard drive, applied AC Power, the laptop powered on for a few seconds, powered off, powered on again, double-blinked capslock 5 times, powered off, powered on again, and is back to doing the blink capslock once approximately every second that I opened this thread with. Powering on with Windows+B held down, either with or without the USB with HP_TOOLS partition has the same effect too.
I had previously extracted the contents of HP's sp51359.exe and then of the extracted ROM.CAB, renamed the ROM.bin file to 68PFU.bin and the efibios.sig file to 68PFU.sig and placed them in the Hewlett-Packard\BIOS\Current folder on the USB stick. I've since compared the extracted.bin with the one in the Rompaq folder and they are identical. I also copied them to the New and Previous folders as per another post. Booting with Windows+B or all-arrow-keys causes the USB stick to be read only briefly and does not result in the BIOS being reflashed. I've now also copied them into the same folders on the HP_TOOLS partition of the hard drive after connecting it to another PC and retried the experiment with no success. I did find the HP LED codes document (that I can't yet post the URL of). The double blinks that I initially get when I reset the CMOS means "BIOS corruption failure"; after that, I get single blinks which means CPU failure I hope that is an artifact of the BIOS failure and not that I've killed the CPU with all the handling. Any other suggestions?
Someone on ebay is selling the BIOS flashed into a part for $20. I'm going to look into taking the laptop apart and replacing the BIOS that way.
I found a replacement motherboard for $35 and am going go with that approach instead. I'm rationalizing that I get a CPU upgrade out of it too