Loko’s Domain You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Before the Beginning

There is no going forward without an A/C adapter. You’ll also need a USB flash drive formatted in FAT32. I used a 4GB stick, so size should not be an issue. Note: I use examples from my experiences for filenames. While the names will differ, follow the renaming scheme. It’ll make sense, I promise. Unless you don’t have an HP.

Obligatory Anecdotal Beginning

I was really excited about this one. A customer came in with a laptop that was a paperweight after trying to flash the BIOS with the WinFlash utility. Windows crashed during the update and the BIOS was gone. I’ve never recovered from this situation before and usually thought cutting your loses and buying a new laptop was the better solution.

The laptop he brought in was very new with Windows 7 installed, so I didn’t want to give that prognosis. After much research (Goo-Fu), I found very helpful information that would allow me to solve the problem.

The First Steps

The first steps you’ll have to perform on another computer that has an internet connection. Navigate to the HP website, go to Software & Driver Downloads. Type in the product number for the machine. Then select the right operating system. After this, go down to where is says BIOS and expand the selection.

Download the latest update. If you were planning on flashing to the new update, better grab the latest release. It will update according to the update. After downloading the file, do not run the executable file. What you’re going to do is extract the container to get the precious goodies that are stored inside.

E X T R A C T I O N

If you have 7-Zip, you can do this by right-clicking the “sp45138.exe” file, go to “Extract to ‘sp45183.exe\’”. This will create a new folder with the filename as the directory. Navigate to that folder and you’ll see several files. You should see filenames with as “3603F21.fd”. There may be two, I recommend using the highest numbered one. I put both 3602F21.fd and 3603F21.fd on the flash drive, though. Just in case.

The Renaming Scheme

This next step involves renaming that file and copying it to a flash drive. Once you’ve copied the file to a flash drive formatted in FAT32 (this is just an example, it probably won’t be the same for you, but follow the renaming scheme), rename the file from “3603F21.fd” to “3603.BIN”. Essentially, you’re just leaving the first four characters in the filename and changing the .FD extension to .BIN.

Hard Part Over

To begin, make sure the laptop is turned off. Remove the laptop battery and unplug the A/C adapter. Make sure you have the A/C adapter. You cannot perform this recovery, or even trigger it, without plugging in the proper A/C adapter.

C-C-C-Combo Boot

After a moment, insert the battery back into the laptop and plug in the A/C adapter. Insert the USB flash drive in any USB port. Once the USB flash drive is in place, hold the Windows Key and the “B” key. The WinKey is the key typically on both left and right bottom sides of the keyboard with the Windows logo. Hold these two keys together before powering on the laptop. While holding the keys, power on the laptop.

Incessant Beeping

Give it a few seconds. Those beeps? Normal. It’ll seem never ending and frightening because it’s one beep every second for several seconds. Those that experienced POST errors will remember those beeps as bad. The flash drive will also light up a lot as it is being searched. It’ll beep a whole lot more. Keep holding those keys.

Note: I’ve read that most people experience when the file is being applied, the beeping stops or becomes once every few seconds. It went once every three seconds for me, but at no point did it stop. It went on for about one minute and then the laptop shutdown by itself. I was in awe as this method was completely new to me.

The Beginning of the End of the End

I removed the USB flash drive and booted the laptop up again. I was presented with a POST message asking if I would like to load the CMOS defaults or go into the BIOS to configure everything. I chose the defaults for now and after a few seconds, Windows began to boot as normal. After Windows 7 was done loading, I rebooted a couple of times, went into the BIOS to adjust time/date, and make sure everything was working as expected.

The BIOS version reported the same version I used to recover, as expected.

Then that’s it. The laptop was back up and running in under five minutes without any nasty side effects and the user was very happy. After this experience, I won’t disregard BIOS updates knowing that recovery is possibly from a failed flash.

As for the source of this fix, I wound up with a PDF file that I initially ignored that has several steps noted on how to begin. I cannot find where this attachment came from, but I’ll keep looking.