Bios for Z600 workstation bios upgrade

[cygnuslabs]

I need the latest Bios for a Z600 Workation

[SDH]

Google for Z600 drivers. The top result is the HP site. Click on that. For OS choose windows 7 64 bit. It should also have been linked to if you chose W8 x64, but the old workstation drivers availability is a bit outdated. The latest BIOS will be listed there... 3.61. It is an oldie but a goodie. Works fine here also with a W11 install on my Z600 I experiment with. The latest BIOS for all Windows installs is the same but how you install it can produce or prevent troubles. If you use the old provided in-OS method but run that from within a new OS that can cause troubles. For years now we have only been using the upgrade BIOS from within BIOS method, with zero issues. See below:

Download the SoftPaq from there. Run it as an administrator but don't use the Windows interface it offers. Instead, after running it you can go into your C drive and on its root level you'll see a SWSetup folder that running the SoftPaq created. In there will be a folder with same name as the downloaded softpaq (SP84160).

In there will be the latest BIOS update .bin file inside several of the folders, for example in DOS_flash... they're all the same regardless of where you find them in there. The 3.61 bin file is named 7G4_0361.bin. Copy that onto  the top level of a fat32 formatted thumb drive, nothing else on it. Shut down, then cold boot up and go into BIOS. On the first page of BIOS there is an option to flash system ROM from within BIOS. This method protects you from flashing from within an OS with the potential risks kept to a minimum.

For example, the OS may be much newer than the application contained in the SoftPaq and the new OS may not know how to properly deal with that old app. An OS-based BIOS install may have to deal with antiviral or other settings that could interfere with a clean BIOS upgrade. We've even seen corruption of the BIOS upgrade due to the issues above, but never have seen that when updating BIOS from within BIOS.

Go take a break while the BIOS upgrade is going on... it can take some time, and you don't want to mess things up by starting to interact with the computer before it is done. The upgrade may auto-restart the computer as part of the process. I finally always shut down and do a fresh startup after a new BIOS update.

EDIT: This method works great up through the ZX20 workstation series. Once you get to the ZX40 series and on HP changed where you put the .bin file. For these later workstations you put it down in the bottom folder of 3 nested folders, each named specifically. See attached PDF for those details.