Possible bios recovery problem?

[Sammy_ALB]

Hi Neotherealone, only to ask you ere did you find the sp70376.exe bios update file. can you please send me the link? I would realy appretiate your help and by the way I did not yet try your solution as I just read it but is worth trying.

If this work I'll promote you for a job at HP or perhaps not that would like a punishment instead, I would buy you a 6 pack (a tray with 6 beer bottles).

Thanks again and please don forget to send me the link.

Sam

[Neotherealone]

hey sammy,

sure no problem, here is the link :

http://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp70001-70500/sp70376.exe

also to the other guy with the Bios reset PIN question:

Just take both jumpers (cmos PW, and cmos reset) and move them parallel to the next available pins (as if you would lift them up simultaneously). Unless you really have another MOBO you might want to research the right position.

good luck to everyone !

also ill gladly take the sixpack instead of the HP-job 😄

[ThingBlue]

For your issue of not being able to find the correct pins, do you see the doc pins and 2 jumper below the ones you mentioned? There should be a label around these pins saying "CLR_PASS" and "CLR_CMOS." These would be the pins that you're looking for. I believe there is an HO document on how to use these pins but I seem to not be able to find it again...

[ThingBlue]

Sorry about bad spelling... There should be six pins below the ones you saw and two jumpers on these six pins. If you turned your computer so that the side with the power button is facing you, The jumper on the bottom would be the on you're looking for. Just ignore the jumper and the three pins on the top, and do what most tutorials tell you to.

My computer has the same issue. Resetting the CMOS seemed to make it partially work for 12 hours, and then everything went downhill from there.

[Pewlett-Hackard]

First of all I'd like to thank TheITGirlUK and legby for finding the solution to this problem.

I've spent over 30 hours trying to diagnose the problem and finally got it fixed when I found your posts here! Here were the issues I was having:

1. Had BIOS version 8.15 with Windows 10, everything ran fine.

2. Installed BIOS update 8.17, which is the latest official update for the HP c500 series found on HP's site.

3. Computer would no longer start:

     a) Fans would run

     b) Would not POST beep (1 short beep indicating your computer can start) with RAM

     c) BIOS long beep 5 times without RAM

     d) Black screen since the computer could not POST

4. Followed TheITGirlUK's instructions to start computer and here are some comments:

     a) I did not have to hold Windows + B

     b) Did not have to reseat memory module

     c) Be persistent. It may take MANY attempts before you get it to work. It took me about 10 attempts.

     d) Be patient. Sometimes it only POSTs after waiting 5-10 minutes for a single attempt. I recommend you do not make another attempt unless you had waited at least 10 minutes.

5. Once I was able to get update SP70376.exe (BIOS version 8.2A), everything went back to normal and boots up.

Thank you so much guys! I couldn't have done it without you!

I'm flabbergasted from the lack of support from HP representatives. Not only are they not supporting us here, they are currently issuing a BIOS update that (almost) bricks your motherboard. The flawed update is live right now, as of August 30, 2016! The only response in this thread from an HP representative was by danny-r who had asked a member to ask his question in English. Isn't it ironic when it turns out that he's the one with the solution to our problem?

I'm sure many people believe their motherboard may be physically damaged and have ordered replacements, throwing away a perfectly fine motherboard into the ever-growing wasteyards.

[TheITGirlUK]

Another successful fix is always good to see @Pewlett-Hackard. The Window+B thing was always likely to be a red herring but without another "bricked" motherboard to play with it's impossible to find other ways of cracking the nut.

[comprepairshop]

Seems like my post got deleted somehow.  Here it is again:

I have two of these desktops and they both have this exact problem.  I was able to revive one  using the jumper switching technique but it seemed like a fluke.  After I performed the jumper switch while powered on, I left the computer on for around a minute (with jumpers back in their normal position) and I it posted by itself (with time error).  I booted to a flash drive with windows 2 go and the bios update.  I updated the bios and was good to go.  Did have to reinstall windows since it bsod'd on startup.

Now I can't get it to work on the other computer.  Tried about 20 times so far with all sorts of random times for the jumper switches.  HP needs to document a for sure way to get  these to post again so were not stumbling around in the dark.

[rallymanuk]

I have re-installed windows 8 onto my p7-1529 desktop the version it came with, i did all the updates and when it restarted it went to a black screen. So i shut it down pulled out the cmos battery, then on the set of jumpers nearest to the sata connectors it actually says on the board cmos reset and password reset, i moved the cmos jumper from 1 and 2 to 5 and 6 positions for 5 seconds, then returned the jumper to the original 1 and 2 pins. I then replaced the cmos battery and restarted the pc and i left it for 5 mins after which time it said press f1 to boot which it did. I copied the bios file from  software and drivers on another pc the latest bios which is version 8.20 onto a usb stick then i ran it on the hp pc. It upgraded the bios and restarted fine. I have left it overnight then restarted it. It now beeps when it starts up and now everything runs fine. I dont know if this will work with windows 7 version because i cant see any drivers for windows 7 on the hp list for the p7-1529.

[Edwardlon]

I've been meaning to update this thread with the results of my tests and fixs.

As a reminder a friend has a P6-2295 which, upon win10 upgrade, would no longer boot or even the UEFI/Bios coming up (=black screen). At a best guess the reason for this problem is compatibility issues between Win10 secure mode and the BIOS secure mode on the HP motherboard.  But I can't be 100% sure as HP are being closed lipped on this.  But they do say that the BIOS update is 'critical'.

I have since updated the BIOS in this machine and restored it to factory condition.

I was encouraged by http://www.theitgirl.co.uk/ who posted earlier in this thread and said I should persist.  So I did.

Essentially what I found worked for me.  I tried things in various and numerous ways. 

1. Reset the existing BIOS to its default values.  This is achieved by removing battery, all RAM and disconnecting the HDD SATA cable. And then booting up without battery, RAM and HDD.  You should get 5 beeps which indicates the BIOS is working just fine.  5 beeps = no ram.

2. Insert RAM and battery. No need to play around with the jumper switches (either the password reset one or the BIOS recovery one).  For the most part I found that I did not get a BIOS boot from cold start. The trick I found was to cold boot and then if no BIOS boot then to briefly hit the front power switch. This 'warm boot' usually kicked the BIOS boot.

3. Instead of hitting F10 to get to the BIOS menu I used ESC to get to the UEFI menu. From there you can get to the BIOS menu but more importantly you can boot up devices such as USBs, HDDs etc.  There are other utilities in the UEFI menu - such as command line mode and various fix utilities.

4. So with the above I was happy I could now boot up the BIOS. So I reconnected the SATA cable to the HDD (obviously all critical steps like this was after full power down). In my case the OS on the HDD was all mucked up by the failed Windows 10 upgrade the user did.

5. So I temporarily switched the HDD with one that I had a Windows install on (Server 2012, but it could be anything that boots up (even an old windows 7 install I imagine).  This is so I could get to installing the BIOS update files.  But, depending on the state of the HDD OS you may be able to boot up into Windows.  Either via the UEFI boot option or directly if the relevant boot loader is still intact.

6. Once I was in Windows it was a simple matter of copying across the BIOS update files and running it. I could not run the BIOS update files from the UEFI utilities (see 3 above) as the necessary sub-sections are not present in that minimal OS.

7. So I went from an old BIOS ver. 7.12 (dated July 6th 2012) to ver. 8.2 (dated Jan. 12 2015).  Machine boots just fine - and is consistent.

8. As I said I could not boot the existing HDD as it was mucked up. I got errors such as 'wdf violation', drive not mounted or drive in use by another process etc. So I gave up on trying to fix that and simply restored the factory setting from the image discs the user had luckily created when first obtaining the machine.  I had anyway copied over all the user's data from the HDD previously.

Some additional commentary which may or may not be useful for others reading this thread.

a. The key combination of "Windows B" when booting up is only effective for restoring a backed up BIOS version that will have been stored on the HDD if the BIOS had previously been updated. For most readers here I assume that will not be the case.  Anyway I found that hitting the front power switch to force a warm boot up was the trick that got me there. YMMV.

b. The BIOS update and importantly the release notes can be more easily found in the HP FTP site. Go to ftp.hp.com (using a FTP client such as filezilla) and navigate to the relevant softpaq in /pub/softpaq.  The softpaq I used was SP70376.  Be sure to also download the relevant HTML and CVA files for useful additional information.

In the case of SP70376 (the bios update) HP says:

"Improved security of UEFI code and variables. HP strongly recommends promptly
transitioning to this updated BIOS version which supersedes all previous releases."

c. HP provides a 3 in 1 tool for diagnosing their desktops and noteooks which, importantly, can be configured to update the BIOS of a computer. Instructions are given in the 3in1 tool for updating a BIOS (SP703676 in our case for Joshua motherboards). Essentially one needs to extract the jos_820.rom file from the SP70376.exe file and copy that over to the USB created in the 3in1 tool.

The 3in1 tool can be found in the FTP repository.  The latest version is SP77842.  it is 1.8gb so may take a while to download.

Hope the above details are useful for someone to get their 'bricked' HP machine back up and running.

Edward

London UK

ps: Zero thanks to HP

[ReptalEST]

Hi.

Where im find this Bios update? (Installed BIOS update 8.17, which is the latest official update for the HP c500 series found on HP's site.)

My HP MOBO: joshua-h61-uatx (joshua)

Please LINK. Tnx.