Reflashing BIOS.

[Todd Millecam]

HP computers will sometimes let you access the EFI shell via F11 on post
(you have to be in EFI mode, not legacy).   The shell has DOS-like syntax
and boots to your EFI helper partition (which may have been partially nuked
by dban). If you can get that up, then you can probably poke around in
there, and you should be able to manually select your bootloader from
there.  If you find a file named winbootmgr.efi or grubx86.efi then you
just type the full path to those files and it'll try to boot them, linux
kernels also have EFI stubs now that'll let you boot the kernel directly
(pass in a root partition argument).  An EFI shell should see and be able
to access any bootable media on the machine.

Let me know if you can get into an EFI shell.

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Stephen M <smelheim85 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes the BIOS does see them both.  The trouble is that it was booting to
> EFI first now it won't boot to either legacy or EFI.  It just sits there
> after the setup screen.
> Ya thats what I am trying to work with.  I have a copy of WINs7 but it
> doesn't want to load.  This computer doesn't have a floppy and I don't have
> access to one at the moment.  So I need to find other solutions.
>
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 11:21 AM, Stephen Partington <cryptworks at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>>
>> 2 thoughts,
>>
>> 1 - Does the bios see the drive physically?
>>
>> 2 - you will need a boot disk (freeDOS or something similar) to run the
>> executable. or a windows environment.
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Michael Butash <michael at butash.net>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>  HP is notoriously horrible about supporting linux on desktop or
>>> laptop's, so you won't get help there.  They're also quite proprietary acpi
>>> implementations, so likely still (haven't looked in a while) no one bothers
>>> to figure out and support them.
>>>
>>> My first, and subsequently last, hp laptop I kept the original windoze
>>> disk for this purpose alone, and just loaded new ssd's with linux.  About
>>> 6mo ago I sold to a friend, but flashed the bios from windoze luckily
>>> having kept it as the only option I could find to get a current bios on
>>> it.  Install xp long enough on a temp disk to flash it?
>>>
>>> This is why I've usually decried HP to the good folks on this list -
>>> they're just not linux friendly, and hardly worth a darn for anything but
>>> servers anymore.
>>>
>>> -mb
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 12/17/2014 11:03 AM, Stephen M wrote:
>>>
>>>  Hi,
>>>
>>>  I need help again to be able to reflash my BIOS.  The reason is that my
>>> computer is having trouble reading my drives, CDs, or USBs.  I know this is
>>> the case with the desktop because it works fine in my laptop.  I have tried
>>> to reset the BIOS and thought at first to reinstall GRUB.  Nothing is
>>> working but my HDD does show it does have a OS on it.
>>>
>>>  i already downloaded the BIOS version from HP but it is an exe file.
>>> Could anyone help me to see how I can fix this problem?
>>>
>>> --
>>> Stephen Melheim
>>> 602-400-7707
>>> SMelheim85 at gmail.com
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
>> rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.
>>
>> Stephen
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> Stephen Melheim
> 602-400-7707
> SMelheim85 at gmail.com
>
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>


-- 
Todd Millecam
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