Z440 BootBlock Recovery

[Veit_Marelli]

Hello, i have switched off a Z440 during BIOS flashing,

and now have the 8 beeps/red LED diagnostic code.

The Maintenance and Service guide describes this case as

"Red Power LED blinks eight
times, once every second,
then stops blinking.
Entering FailSafe
(BootBlock) Recovery
Mode
Either FailSafe detected a corrupted ROM, or the user pressed Esc
before powering on. The BIOS does not halt at this point, but attempts
to boot to a ROMPaq floppy or CD-ROM (USB devices are not
supported).
1.
Reflash ROM with a ROMPaq floppy or CD-ROM.
2.
The problem might be in the system board. Contact HP for
assistance."

Where do i get te ROMPaq? In some other place (forgot where) i read that USB is not supported,

and looking at the flash image size of 10 MiB, a real floppy (no controller on the main board)

or USB floppy drive would not be sufficient.

What kind of ROMPaq CD-ROM is expected?

Just containing the file, or some kind of bootable DOS image with a flash tool on it?

[Veit_Marelli]

I have tried sp96292.tgz and sp140182.exe, and burned the iso images (M60_0248.iso and M60_0259.iso),

did not help. i tried USB sticks that allow F10 BIOS update on other machines of same type.

Did not work, but took longer to give the 8 beep+red LED code.

I have extracted the hidden HD image from the ISO images to an SD card.

DID not work. tried on a micro SD using a different read, failed also.

Moved the file from \Hewlett-Packard\BIOS\New\M60_0259.bin to \M60_0259.bin,

and that worked! Next i would likely have tried renaming it to \M60.bin.

So FAT16 partition on a USB card read media, plugged in front side USB worked.

Machine rebooted several times, but beep codes were gone.

Later found that the video cable was not attached correctly,

got kind of invalid setting/invalid date and time black on white error screens,

which i could resolve by placing the battery back.

Attempt to replace the BIOS logo gives

"eRepLogo: Failed to read ROM",

but this is a minor problem.

This indicates that HP does not test the procedure written in the

Maintenance and Service Guide. Not a big surprise.

[Veit_Marelli]

Also that ~22 MiB FAT16 partition has the label HP-BIOS (not HP_BIOS).

Not sure if that had any influence.