adding FeatureByte Information to the BIOS.

[Anius]

I'm trying to readd the FeatureByte Informatioon to the BIOS.

However I am not having any luck at it always comes back with "Invalid FeatureByte" . is it possible for someone to validate what the correct charchters are ? I can post a photo of what I have on the computer. I believe I am not recognising some lowercase charachter .   What I believe to be the correct is as below ( as entered in BIOS System IDs )

2U2V 333E 3K3N 3Q3R 3y4k 5W5c 5h6J 6S6Z
6b7B 7C7K 7M7Q 7T7W 8Q9S 9Va3 adap aqas
au  .BY

[erico]

The feature you are asking about involves the use of proprietary utilities.

That is beyond the intended scope of this forum.

Perhaps you should be asking this question and reading the discussions at the BIOS mod websites. 

[Anius]

Thanks Erico, I am nnot asking about the Utilities, and actually no utilities are required in the current generation on HP computers.  This information is already available in different thread on this forums.

 Thre are two reasons :

1. HP seems to have lost expertise on not using certain charachters to avoid confusion ( e,g Certain charachters might be too similar) .  In my scenario , in fact I believe I am misinterpreting an uppercase letter for a lower case or a lowercase for an upper case.which is causing the Validation to fail.

2. I did have a followup question, which I would have posted if an HP employee has replied. i,e is HP planning to release a consumer level fix for this fisaco they didnt forsee where consumers are not able to use the software they paid for? 

This is a serios issue and they have not made any reasonable attempts to rectify the situation other than ask people to send it to depot, which is fine for people under warranty but people out of warranty shouldnt have to pay for an issue that is really HP's mistake. ( reminds me of the HP printer cartidges with expiry dates in firmware).

for now I am just seeking answer to question no. 1   🙂

Spoiler

[erico]

OK.

Good luck 🙂

[Anius]

Finally I was able to enter the information. 

Just in case anyone else has ttrouble with the Font on the Flexbuild label , The Feature Bytes are grouped in TWO charchters but entered as group of four. With the exception of the the checksum which is entered on its own with a space and dot preceding it (" .BY"  in my case).   So each Feature actually consists of two charachters  ( such as 33 or 3E ).

They start in numerical sequence , with Numbers first , UPPERcase letters Second and lower case letters third ( e,g 111A 1B1c 1d22 2A2B 2c2d ) . This might be confusing , But if youre stuck enter the charchters as on the Flexbuild label and keep this statement in the back of your mind.

What I figured was that CAPITOL Letters are entered first  ( e,g  3Q3R 3y ) So if youre doubful and  the letters seems like a lowercase letter , but there is a UPPER caser letter after it, then its a UPPERCASE letter you should enter. likewise for lower case letters. ( if you think its a UPPERCASE letter and there is lowercase case letters before itthen its a lower case letter you should be entering. (e,g 5h6J 6s6Z  This "S" cannot be an lower case S since there is Uppercase letters  in the "6" series after it ). 

So the correct Feature Byte for Envy H8-1569 are

2U2V 333E 3K3N 3Q3R 3y4k 5W5c 5h6J 6S6Z
6b7B 7C7K 7M7Q 7T7W 8Q9S 9Va3 adap aqas
au  .BY

[Skylarking]

Yeah, an old post but i thought i'd post my $0.02 worth 🙂

According to public HP information, the featurebyte can be entered with or without whitespaces. If any whitespaces are entered, the BIOS strips them from the string and calculates the checksum verifying the string is correct before actually saving the data.

And you can save the featurebyte on a virgin motherboard only once as the BIOS will not allow it to be changed once it has been validated and stored. As such, the only time a owner should ever need to add a featurebyte is if they replaced their faulty motherboard with a new virgin motherboard outside their warranty period.

At such times, when an owner has hardware problems and needs another motherboard, owners are confronted with needing to enter a featurebyte. At this point in time does it truely become apparant that HP chose the font and size used on their labels extremely poorly.

In any case, the only difference i see between your featurebyte label and the featurebyte text you typed on your first post is simply related to whitespaces, so it shouldn't matter. Equally odd is that there is no difference between the featurebyte text you typed on your first post and that on your last post. So it's simply not clear to me why you couldn't have the string accepted by BIOS as whitespaces are irrelevant. And I couldn't see any errors with respect to the featurebyte characters being missinterpreted as upper/lower case :?

Per chance, your not dyslexic are yuo 😉

If your interested in what the featurebytes actually mean, then you can look inside your system recovery disks using 7-zip. Look for "options map" and "DMI.ini" as that tells you much, for example 46=Vos.p is associated with featurebyte 46 and presumably means the OS version is "Professional", while 6b=ATF_HAL.64 and presumably means 64 bit OS and 67=ATF_OS.7 presumably means Windows 7.  So seeing 67... 6b... 46 within the featurebyte, as is the case on my Z210, means that the system recovery disk will restore Windows 7 Professional x64 (64-bit).... Oddly some featurebyte number seem to have dual meaning and as such there must be some positional meaning within the string itself :? Guess it's all part of HP's secret sauce...

Cheers...

[edited to fix poor punctuation & spelling]

[kaleem3]

hi iam facing add feature byte option 

given error feture byte CRC failed 

[kaleem3]

HP ELITEDESK 800 G2 SMALL FORM FACTOR PC (ENERGY STAR)

[Skylarking]

The featurebyte and other data is printed on a lables usually on the bottom or side of your computer case and is specific to the system configuration (hardware, os, etc) you actually purchased. It is entered into the BIOS by HP during manufacture and is used by the HP system recovery disks when you rebuild your system for some reason.

So read the featurebyte from your label using a magnifying glass (or take a picture using your smart phone and then zoom into the picture so you can clearly see the characters).

And keep in mind the previous comments by Anius and by Skylarking within this thread and you should have a much clearer understanding of how the featurebyte is structured and what the featurebyte bits mean for your specific system (as seen on your lable).

And do note that end user will normally not need to add a featurebyte or other factory data to the BIOS 🙂

But if your system is out of warranty and you have purchased a virgin motherboard from HP, to replace your faulty mobo on your out of warrranty system, then you may want to add the featurebyte, buildid and other data as used by the factory recovery disks.

But again, the featurebyte can only be added once at which point it can not be changed without HP proprietary tools.

So, if you bought a second hand motherboard to fix your faulty one, it will already have had a featurebyte entered into the BIOS non volotile RAM and you will not be able to change it. And if the already entered featurebyte does not have the code for the OS you paid for, example 67=Windows7, 6b=64bits, your HP recovery disks will fail to reinstall Windows 7.

Bottom line is, if you enter BIOS and type CTRL-A, and see a featurebyte has already been entered, then you WILLNOT BE ABLE TO CHANGE THE FEATUREBYTE! So in this scenario, even if you enter a correct featurebyte and see no error message, upon reboot the old featurebyte will return 😞

I guess the real issue is what are you trying to achieve and why are you entering a featurebyte?

[kaleem3]

hi support 

already done mantion error