Updating your HP BIOS in 256 easy(ish)(not really) steps

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

In case you can’t tell by the title of this post, I’m… mildly… annoyed with HP right now. The story starts with my just-over-a-year-old HP Pavilion laptop that has been having problems with its power brick.

While I was at work on Monday, the laptop started running on batter power even when it was plugged in, but when I got home, everything worked perfectly. I assumed it had something to do with the power at work, and wondered whether it might even be firmware related. I looked through the newest BIOS’s changelog, and, sure enough there was something mentioned about power and charging, so I downloaded it and updated my BIOS.

At least, that’s what I would have done if I was running Windows. Unfortunately for me, I’m not. I don’t even have a dual-boot system because I haven’t really needed Windows for years, and, when I do, a VM does the job just fine.

The only BIOS update HP offers is a Windows exe file, so I downloaded it, and ran cabextract to get the files off it. The tool lshw told me that my motherboard was an 0820D, and the zip contained a file called 0820DF45.bin (the BIOS revision is F.45), so I had everything I needed. I put the bin file on a USB, rebooted into HP’s recovery tools, and then went to firmware management, selected the bin file… and fail! It sat there telling me that I need a signature file for the firmware.

So I searched for the signature file, but it wasn’t in the exe. I googled for it, and found a lot of people who seem to be in the same boat. One suggestion was to run the exe on a Windows system and select the “Put BIOS update on USB” option. Sounded easy enough, so I booted my Windows VM, ran the exe, accepted the stupid EULA (I’m pretty sure I saw something in the forty-third paragraph about dancing on one leg while balancing a cupcake on my nose), installed the BIOS updater, and… nothing. After twenty seconds or so, a message popped up, “This program might not have installed correctly. Install using compatibility settings?” Yeah, thanks. After multiple attempts at different compatibility settings… still nothing.

I googled around a bit more, and found a 2GB HP USB image that you can use to recover your BIOS if it gets corrupted. Sweet! I downloaded it, and several hours later, I found out it only has the original BIOS revision (complete with a signature file!), but not my latest update!

At this point, I was desperate. My final hope was to figure out some way to boot my laptop into Windows. I have an 500GB SSD with a grand total of 30GB free, so that wasn’t an option. What about a Live USB? I mean, Linux distributions have had Live CDs and USBs forever, so it must just work in Windows, right?

Nope. Not unless you have Windows 10 Enterprise with it’s Windows-to-go feature. Luckily, the guys over at Hasleo software have created a nifty little tool called WinToUSB that does the same thing. I copied my VM image over to a USB, booted from it, and ran the BIOS update.

It worked perfectly and even offered to put the BIOS update on a USB! It seems that HP, in their infinite wisdom, have designed the updater so it refuses to start unless you’re on an HP machine.

To add insult to injury, all the updater does is copy the BIOS bin file and its signature onto the EFI partition, where it gets updated after a reboot. As far as I can tell, the signature file is generated on the fly by the updater, which begs the question… Why? Why generate the signature on the fly, rather than just stick it in the embedded CAB file with the BIOS images? Why require an HP system to generate a USB image containing the BIOS update? Why require your users to dance on one foot while balancing a cupcake on their nose?

And, as further insult (or maybe we’re back to injury), the BIOS update didn’t fix my charging problem, and it turns out that my just-out-of-warranty power brick is dying. Thanks, HP. You guys rock! After three HPs laptops in a row, I think it may be time for a change.

Picture of burning laptop by secumem, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license

Thank you, HP

Last September, while I was on sabbatical in the States, I bought an HP laptop (along with my HP tablet and HP phone). I ordered it online and specced it to have a full HD display and a Radeon video card in addition to the built-in Intel video, and was very happy with it.

The one complaint I had was that the fan started making noise after four or five months (at which point I was back in Lebanon). I tried disassembling the laptop to clean the fan, and it didn’t fix the problem. So I just let it go, and, eventually, the noisy fan got quieter.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that my laptop was running visibly slower than usual, and I rebooted. As came back up, I got a warning from the BIOS saying that the fan was no longer working correctly. I put my hand next to the fan outlet, and there was almost no air movement. The fan wasn’t completely dead, but it sure wasn’t working the way it should. When Fedora finished booting, it was running slow again. I checked the sensors, and, sure enough, it was running hot. Very hot. Obviously the fan needed to be replaced.

I checked the warranty status on my laptop, and found, to my surprise, that, even though I bought it in the US, it was covered with a world-wide warranty. Supposedly I could take my laptop anywhere in the world and have it repaired for free.

Now, I’ve lived in Lebanon for many years, and found that ‘customer service’ here normally consists of waving goodbye as you walk away with your new purchase. And a warranty is worth its weight in gold… until you leave the shop. Then it no longer applies, because, obviously, warranties aren’t intended to protect you once you’ve started using the product. This applies to the bigger international companies as well as the smaller mom-and-pop shops. I remember asking the local official Skoda dealer about a warranty on a used car and he told me, “I’ll give you a verbal warranty.” For some reason, I was less than impressed.

I contacted HP in Lebanon and they directed me to one of the HP authorized repair centers called Computer Information Systems (CIS). I took my laptop in last Friday and fully expected to be told that, for some obscure reason, the fan wasn’t going to be covered under warranty. Instead, they took my laptop without any hassle at all.

On Tuesday (two working days later!), I got a call from CIS telling me that it was ready. I went back in and got my laptop back, again with no hassle at all. They did tell me that I was in luck that they had the part because it was a US model, but they would have ordered the part if they hadn’t had it in stock.

So, while I’m not impressed that the system fan died so quickly, I’m very impressed that HP automatically gave me a worldwide warranty and I’m astounded that CIS did the work quickly without trying to find some way to charge me. Thank you both for your professionalism!

The phone is dead, long live the phone

The phone is dead
I bought my first smartphone, a Nokia N900, just before Christmas, 2009. Chosen because its OS was the closest thing to a stock Linux distro I could find, the N900 has stood me in good stead for the last almost two years. I’ve used it to ssh into servers and restart failed services, stream video from a LEGO robot to my laptop, and Skype my family in the States while I was in Lebanon (if I remember correctly, it was the first smartphone to include Skype, though I may be wrong).

So fast-forward to a few weeks ago, with me sitting at my home in southwest Washington, enjoying my sabbatical. I glanced down at my phone and noticed something strange: The phone signal bar was gone, and in its place was a funky symbol that I finally realized was a SIM card with a red line through it. Restarting the phone fixed the problem. But over the next few days, the red SIM of death (RSOD) appeared more and more often and I finally reached the end of my rope.

Some research on the web, and a dmesg or two later revealed that the phone’s modem was constantly resetting, and, given the reset rate, was probably going bad. As I bought the phone in the US, it only had a one year warranty… and I was screwed. Bummer. Less than two years after buying it, my $550 phone had become an expensive unimpressive tablet. Thanks, Nokia. And now I had to replace it.

Long live the phone
During the HP Touchpad firesale, I managed to get ahold of one, and was really impressed by its ease of use, especially when it comes to multitasking. So I went to see what kind of WebOS phone I could get for cheap, and came up with the HP Veer. I managed to get it and a touchstone for just over $100, including shipping.

So far, I’ve been fairly impressed with it. Like Android, WebOS uses the Linux kernel, but not much of the higher stack. It doesn’t use X or any of the other standard applications that make up a normal Linux distro. Having said that, WebOS has strengths of its own. The N900 was great at multitasking, but the Veer takes it to a new level. WebOS’s card interface is not only easy to use, but also quite fun. There’s community-created software available from preware.org, and I’ve managed to overclock both the Touchpad and the Veer.

My main annoyance with the Veer is that it can sometimes be a bit unresponsive; I’ll tap the hang up button and it will flash, I’ll tap it again and it will flash again, but it won’t hang up until the third or fourth tap. I can understand that it may be thinking, but I find it a bit annoying to have the phone act like it received the event and then ignore it.

The most common complaint you’ll hear about the Veer is that it’s too small. And it is small, very small. But I’ve got small hands, so I don’t find the keyboard hard to use, and they do make good use of the space they’ve got on the display. And, after carrying around the brick that is the N900, it’s nice to have something so light that I can barely feel it in my pocket.

All in all, I find the Veer to be more fun and more intuitive than my wife’s new Android phone (which she is rapidly falling in love with).

Conclusion
So now I get to work out whether to try to get a few bucks by putting my N900 on ebay (but who would buy what’s essentially a two-year-old 5 inch tablet when there’s far better available), or keep it as a remote control for my media center in Lebanon.

And I get to see whether I can do the same kind of cool things with the Veer that I could do with the N900. Unfortunately the Veer doesn’t seem to come with gstreamer, so the LEGO robot idea might be out. But, I have hopes that the Veer will be at least somewhat as hackable as the N900 was.

Offtopic
For those who have been following along, Naomi (my wife) and I are currently on sabbatical in the States, following a month in Ireland. I was hoping for more time to work on Fedora stuff, but the last couple of months have been a bit crazy and I can’t realisticly expect the next few to be much different. I should be able to continue fixing the bugs that have popped up in yum-presto, but not much more than that.

I would love to meet any Fedora people in the area (I’m about an hour north of Portland on I-5), but haven’t had the time to track down if anyone’s actually in the area. I’d also love to do a conference, but, again, don’t know what’s in the area.

For those in Lebanon, we will be back at the end of this year, and I’m already looking forward to seeing you again.