Machine not in committed state after motherboard replacement & other issues

[Marwin]

BIOS issues after motherboard swap on a HP Elitebook 8560w

Since I have exhausted all possible ways on the internet to solve this issue, I thought to give it one last try and publish it here – maybe an expert can suggest a solution.

Preamble:

 I probably fried my old motherboard with a bad power-connector, so I decided to get a new one. The old motherboard was built for a dual core CPU, but since I found a cheap, new motherboard with quadcore CPU and since on the HP forurms I read it was possible to upgrade from a dual core mother board to a quadcore motherboard ( 684319-001 ), I decided to upgrade the motherboard and also get a new used (quadcore) i7 2760QM. Replacing the motherboard went rather smooth, I only realised that the LCD cable was damaged (it was giving black screen), so I had to replace that as well.

Symptoms:

 Having replaced the motherboard, I started getting the message “Warning – machine not in committed state”, but after a split second Windows 10 boots normally (I actually was surprised I didn’t have to reinstall the OS). Furthermore, when I unplug the laptop from the power cord, the screen starts flickering before turning off, but the machine keeps running. The screen also turns off when unplugging the power while in BIOS, so I guess it is not an issue linked to power plans and other Windows stuff.

Things I’ve tried:

I thought the best thing is to leave aside the power issue for now and solve first the software issue hoping that it would also be responsible for the power issue.

First I successfully updated the BIOS to the last available version, F.60.

Then, to get rid of the BIOS error message my first approach was to use the AMTool from ( www.compit.se/?p=206 ), even though I used the HPUSBFW tool to generate a DOS bootable USB stick instead of virtual floppy drive, which won’t run on x64 machines.

When I read the AMT, I get

       VPro uncommitted

       Descriptor unlocked

       Management Engine enabled

       Flash protection override disabled

Which is regular, except for the Management Engine, which in theory should be disabled. On the attempt to shutoff or turn on the ATM I get the error

            Vpro Configuration not supported (Write) Error level == 7

I checked on the Intel website whether the CPU,  has VPro (it has). I also unplugged the MB battery (coin battery) from the motherboard in hope it would reset the VPro as I bought a used CPU, but it didn’t help.

My next guess was that the AMTool won’t work on an unbranded motherboard, so I tried various versions of NBDIMIFIT (from, for example ftp://ftp.grouped-tech.com/Applications/HP%20Tools/    ), but when trying to save P/N(Sku), model name etc., the outcome is always

        Failed to write SKU number.

        Failed to write model name.

After that the NBDIMIFIT.bat prompts me to prepare a FAT32 USB stick with the content of Brand11 in it, enable UEFI boot mode and boot from the efi file bootx64.efi. But this doesn’t work either – the machine won’t boot and show a black screen with white cursor (not blinking), so I guess it freezes. I tried different .efi files but with no success. I even tried a windows bootx64.efi file to see if there is a problem with the uefi boot in general, but with no success, the error being that some booting info is missing due to recent hardware changes.  

These are all possible approaches to the problem I’ve found. Just to recap, the motherboard is new (not used) while the cpu is a used one. For now, unless there is no saint out there with a solution to the problem, I’ll ignore the “not in committed state” warning, hoping it won’t cause issues further down the road and get a new battery in hope it will solve the power issue. Any advice is greatly appreciated of course.

[Happy2help]

Hi Marwin 

these message normally comes after new system board replacement only

hence these values need  to updated in the bios using the DMI utility

these utility are HP Confidential and not customer shareable

Pls call HP Support and needful would be done by HP Engineer

Regards

Happy2help

[Marwin]

Hi,

I solved the blackscreen issue when on battery by updating the Graphic Driver. So now the black screen shows only on bios when on battery -- I can live with that. My guess is that maybe something went wrong while updating the Bios. I used the automatic Bios update tool which loaded Bios version 61 I guess. In the drivers section for my computer (8560w eleitebook) the last version is 50, so maybe the Graphics driver of the Bios is not working properly.

I tried to contact HP support via chat, but they told me to wiat for more than 40 min and then lien broke down.

The seller I bought the motherboard from gave me the DMI with some instructions, but I didn't have the time to try it yet.

Anyways, thank you.