Long-shot help request on recovering a bricked laptop

[surfrock66]

I have an HP Pavilion dv6-6173cl from like 2011; it does everything I need and I do not want to spend money replacing it.  I was gonna switch from Debian -> Ubuntu and had some great idea about switching it to the GPU so my kid could use it for Minecraft...so I went in the BIOS, changed a GPU setting from AUTO to one of them...and poof, no screen or external display works. 

There are no official CMOS reset instructions for this model, just generic ones, which I have tried.  I have, from HP, the last 2 UEFI setups and the last 4 BIOS's.  I am able to use another PC to make a generic BIOS recovery USB from the UEFI setup, and I am able to extract the last 4 bioses, and I am able to use Andy's Phoenix tool to extract the Bin files to "sig" and "bin.dec" files.  One thing is the actual bios exe (sp55068.exe) will NOT run to make the recovery USB (2 popup errors, "WDM: Get support mode error!" and "BIOS did not support InsydeFlash!")

I have tried many combinations of the following:

• Make a FAT or FAT32 USB named "HP_TOOLS" of 2GB and 4GB usb sticks
  
• Filling the USB stick with the encrypted BIOS, or the decrypted BIOS and Sig in  "Hewlett-Packard/BIOS/Current" or in the root.  I've tried various combinations of the extension being all or no caps.  I have also seen/tried renaming the bios file to "SMC.BIN" in the root based on what I've seen in a forum.
  
• Powering on holding Winkey+B with the recovery stick plugged in or not plugged in.
  
• Powering on holding Winkey+V with the recovery stick plugged in or not plugged in.
  
• Various lengths of holding keys/power button.
  
• Trying various combinations of clears involving removing batteries (CMOS + laptop), holding power, etc.
  

I get nothing with any of these.  When I power the laptop on, I get the power LED white, Wifi LED orange, touchpad border lit, badge on the back of the screen lit, caps lock NOT blinking, and screen stays black (no backlight).  I have never seen the activity lights on the USB drives blink, so I can't verify it ever reads.

The ONLY thing that changes what I see, is if i power the laptop off, hold the power button down, it turns on and I keep holding the power, after about 10 seconds it powers off, I keep holding, it then powers on again...and this time, the same lights are on but now the caps lock LED blinks about 1 time/second.  Doing this with multiple combinations of keypresses does nothing. different.

I even went so far as to take the mainboard out and bake it to reflow the solder.  It's doing the same thing as before; the reflow made no difference.

I'm stumped, and can't fathom trashing this laptop because of this.  I can't justify a new one because I don't use this every day, but when I need it I need it.  I have a feeling that my USB structure isn't exactly correct, the file names aren't exact, the key press order isn't exact...something like that, but I feel like I've tried everything.  Any help would be appreciated.

[AemJay]

You might end up having to do a dump and reflash with an external programmer. Happened to me just this week, see my post for reference (https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-S...avilion-17). I am not a professional and would not dare to instruct you on how to do it, but these are the steps:

extracting the current BIOS from the chip with a CH314a programmer and saving it

flashing a fresh image onto the chip

transferring vital infos to the BIOS (several IDs, MAC address, et.)

the following resources might be of interest for you:

https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/7343...d+bootloop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qX2zihB6UE
https://14phoenix.blogspot.com/2013/07/f...s-for.html
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-S...-p/5640454
https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/please...ne/32789/7
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-P...-p/7451305
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhP7FmoRkoY

Kind regards,
Michael

[surfrock66]

I think that's where it's going.  If I already know the MAC address, and it was always in legacy bios, do i even need to pull the info from the existing bios?  This is over my head but I'm willing to learn/try.

[AemJay]

I think that's where it's going.  If I already know the MAC address, and it was always in legacy bios, do i even need to pull the info from the existing bios?  This is over my head but I'm willing to learn/try.

There is more than the MAC address needed and at least in my case not all info could be found on stickers inside. Maybe you are lucky. Getting the info from BIOS is not that difficult, really. It's finding them inside what makes it tedious at first. Mine were at the exact location one of the threads I mentioned stated, so just getting HxD (a hex editor), loading the bin file and searching it. Pretty much like any text file, just with an odd user interface. Searching for the MAC address in hexadecimal format is a good starting point. I did not have the MAC address, so finding it was difficult at first (i did not realize that the mac in hex on the left side was converted to utf on the right side, so it was not recognizable).

[surfrock66]

Chip programmer gets here today, I'm hopeful.  Thanks for the advice.

[surfrock66]

Chip programmer gets here today, I'm hopeful.  Thanks for the advice.

Ok, progress update.  The chip programmer came, I couldn't get it to read with the clip so I desoldered and was able to get a successful dump.  I can see the serial in there and some strings.  This is a lot farther than I thought I would get.  In a way, I'm the dog that caught the truck.

High-level, I need to take the downloaded BIOS file from HP, inject some info from the old chip into it, then flash that.  I have some questions:

1) Do I need to decrypt the bin as it came out of the HP download?  it's a .bin but I know I can use the phoenix tool to split it into a bin and a sig.  Looking at the decrypted one, that looks like it, at the end I can see "$BID01658" which is also at the end of my dump, though the decrypted bios file is SIGNIFICANTLY larger than the one I dumped (decrypted is 4164K, dump is exactly 4096K)
2) Is there a more start-to-finish guide to injecting the strings in the downloaded BIOS?  Also, I'm guessing I need to trim the head of the decrypted bios file, and I'm not finding guides for how to do that.

[AemJay]

Chip programmer gets here today, I'm hopeful.  Thanks for the advice.

Ok, progress update.  The chip programmer came, I couldn't get it to read with the clip so I desoldered and was able to get a successful dump.  I can see the serial in there and some strings.  This is a lot farther than I thought I would get.  In a way, I'm the dog that caught the truck.

High-level, I need to take the downloaded BIOS file from HP, inject some info from the old chip into it, then flash that.  I have some questions:

1) Do I need to decrypt the bin as it came out of the HP download?  it's a .bin but I know I can use the phoenix tool to split it into a bin and a sig.  Looking at the decrypted one, that looks like it, at the end I can see "$BID01658" which is also at the end of my dump, though the decrypted bios file is SIGNIFICANTLY larger than the one I dumped (decrypted is 4164K, dump is exactly 4096K)
2) Is there a more start-to-finish guide to injecting the strings in the downloaded BIOS?  Also, I'm guessing I need to trim the head of the decrypted bios file, and I'm not finding guides for how to do that.

Hey surfrock66,

a quick disclaimer upfront: I am propably as experienced as you are, I gained my knowledge from searching the web and watching youtube videos. So please take my advice with a grain of salt.

In my case I used the bin files exactly like they came out of the Updater after running it and selecting "write update to harddisk for later use" or something like that. The bin file was exactly the same size as the chip, as it should be. It can't be larger so the splitting sounds false.

The updater extracted several bin files, propably for different hardware revisions. I simply opened the bin I extracted from the chip and searched for the name of the bin, without the file extension. So, for 7840D.bin, I searched for 7840D and only one name came up. That was the bin file I used and it worked so maybe that was the correct approach.


Wether or not you need to decrypt the bin file can propably be checked by looking at the content. If it is a scrambled mess, it's encrypted, otherwise not. This might help, there is a lot more info on sizes etc. there also: https://www.bioscreator.com/manual/how-t...-firmware/


BTW, the programmer - more specifically the software to operate it - does not verify reads, so please do the extraction at least twice and compare the output (HxD has a function to compare files, it should say files are identical) before you proceed with flashing to make shure your dump is complete and without read errors.

In my case it was a newer machine and therefore a UEFI firmware, not a classical BIOS. That said, I am not sure if it is comparable for the next steps.

After the flash I turned the machine on an used the key combo for a clear CMOS. After that, the machine was functional, but complained that it was in factory setup mode and the IDs were missing.

I could override the warning though and boot into Windows as normal. From there on I used a tool from a Youtube Video which I believe is taken from HPs UEFI Toolbox meant for corporations rolling out hundreds of machines to their workforce preconfigured. Check the video description, it is the last link in my list in the first post.

That tool brought up a text file. I just needed to amend the text file with the respective strings, save and continue. The tool wrote the info into the UEFI. Job done.

I hope this, together with the links I provided earlier, is of use for you.

I might check back every now and then but can't guarantee anything because I am rather busy atm.

Good luck and godspeed!

Kind regards,
Michael

[surfrock66]

So life happened, got busy, got time, finally got to it...LAPTOP IS BACK ALIVE!!!  I can't believe it and I thank you so much for your help!!!