So, after a simple restart, I have a black screen, and the caps lock is blinking - 2 blinks. According to the codes, that's bios corruption. The laptop originally came with Windows 8, and has been updated to Windows 10. The hard drive was replaced with a new SSD last summer (the original one failed) so the original HP recovery partition does not exist.
In looking up the BIOS updates, the last available BIOS update (dated 2016) file only exists for Windows 8. I have created a USB with the HP Tools utility, but have not run it yet.
My question then - since the machine is no longer running Windows 8, will this BIOS update work correctly and NOT brick my laptop??
I need to get this laptop functioning again, I'd rather not buy another laptop if I can get this one back up. Everything was working just fine before that restart :-/.
Thanks!