Hey guys! As probably many of you after buying an HP laptop I've decided to get rid of all unnecessary (in my opinion) stuff on my hard drive - recovery partition, HP_Tools partition and all the rest of bloatware from the main partition. So I cleaned it all up. Now, recently I had a problem updating my bios. Apparently you you can not do so without "HP_Tools" partition on your hard drive. Thanks to this forum I was able to recover but only to the older version of the bios as in order to be able to do so one needs to have not only the bios file but also a signature file accompanying that bios. Unfortunately Phoenix tool that we currently have is not able to extract the .sig file from the newest forms of bios update files. So I'm asking those of you guys who didn't delete "HP_Tools" partition to please share your bios files together with their .sig files. Please write the bios version that you have and post the link to it on the official hp support site so people could check it out and actually see if it suits their laptops. The bios file with the sig file on your HP_Tools partition are located here - \Hewlett-Packard\BIOS\Current\ My laptop is HP Pavillion dv7-7170er. The latest bios version that can be decoded by Phoenix Tool is F0A. The current one is F24. Can't post the links yet. Thanks.
As I said before I don't want to create no extra useless partitions. I was able to flash/recover my bios using flash drive created by "HP Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Support Environment" but you need to have the the .sig file for the bios. I found some "solution" where they said that if you deleted "HP_Tools" partition then you just need to creat one on your USB drive and then flash the bios - that didn't work, I just bricked my laptop second time. That's why I want people to share those files cause you can update your bios using recovery method with flash drive. P.S By the way NO proper files are created - just empty folders..."new", "current", "previous" that must be filled in by "proper .sig and .bin files"
LatinMcG, you r the one that helped me to recover from bad bios flash. In know that phoenix tool is not working on newest bioses - that's whay I'm asking people that have HP laptops to share their HP_Tools partition content as they DO have those latest bioses with .sig files. Isn't my intention clear? I do have F0A bios and did successfully recovered. But I want the newest bios. And I know the new laptops come with those bios files stored on HP_Tools partition.
Get a life, follow Tito advice, you will have the sig file You do not like the partition, delete it later