14q-cs0006tu RTC Battery

[nuxer]

Hi.

My 14" notebook (14q-cs0006tu), purchased from Amazon, can not retain the date/time after a power on/off cycle, and traditional knowledge suggests I may need to replace its RTC battery. The model is a new one (light weight i3-7020u based laptop), and this problem exists since its first use. Didn't consider it such a big issue to go for a replacement.

Problem is - I could not locate the RTC battery or its connector after opening its bottom cover (which I had opened to replace its new HDD with my old SSD).

Along with its HDD, I have also replaced its OS (Windows 10 Home) with Linux (currently Xubuntu, soon to be replaced with Debian). I had replaced it as soon as I unpacked it, didn't boot windows even once. But I don't think that should have anything to do with this issue, unless my knowledge is too outdated.

My question is - Can anyone confirm whether these notebooks still come with the traditional CR2032 RTC batteries or not? If they do, can someone please help me to locate it? The Service manual of this notebook doesn't mention CMOS/RTC battery anywhere in it.

Thanks!

[iomare · Accepted solution]

Hi,

There is no RTC battery. The little power necessary is taken from the internal battery.

I have seen this problem on some new notebooks and the solution was to update the BIOS. So you can download the BIOS on a Windows PC and create a bootable pendrive to update the PC.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-14q-cs0000-laptop-pc/20395800/model/23...

further info:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebooks-Knowledge-Base/Clock-is-showing-wrong-time/ta-p/7153622

Hope it helps,

David

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[nuxer]

Thank you David, the problem seems to have been solved with your tip.

I had already downloaded that BIOS update, but was apprehensive of going for it after reading its 'FIXES' and 'Revision History' which only mentioned security patches and support for new batteries, nothing about fixing a date/time issue or anything close. But your confirmation gave me the confidence I needed.

Wasn't a smooth ride for me, as my current platform is Linux and the old 'HP_RECOVERY' partition is also gone with the original HDD. Too bad HP doesn't provide Linux tools for such simple but important tasks, even for their non-Windows models (e.g. cs0009tu, which is same as mine, only without windows). For sake of others like me, here's the problems I faced and how I overcame them -

1) Update Utility Needs Windows

The BIOS Update file is an .exe file which requires Windows to run and 'generate' certain files within a certain Directory structure. No easy way as simply extracting some .bin file from it > copying it to a USB drive, and showing it to some BIOS Update utility inbuilt into the system BIOS.

[Update : After successfully updating BIOS as per steps below, I tested and found that this utility can also be run on wine (I used Q4wine), thus avoiding Windows altogether. See the 'Update' at the bottom for details. Although a successful process on Windows (I guess Windows 7 or later) may save all this hassle.]

I used Windows XP 32 bit (a virtualbox VM) to run the utility (sp99212.exe). After extraction phase, it gave me 32 error messages (a pair of errors, repeating 16 times), but opened finally. These were the two errors (repeating 16 times) -

Call driver (read PCI value) failed.

and,

Error M-FD PCI read failed.

These were probably due to lack of EFI environment in the XP OS, or due to it being a virtual machine. Maybe an expert could tell better. But anyhow, it reached the expected 'BIOS Update Utility' window. After choosing 'Create Recovery USB flash drive' option came the next problem -

2) USB Flash Drive not detected by BIOS Update Utility

I used two SanDisk Cruzer Blade USB2 flash drives, one 32GB, the other 16GB, both formatted as FAT32. Neither appeared in the drive selection window. Taking a shot in the dark, I renamed them as HP-TOOLS and HP_Recovery, but it didn't help. I left it renamed as 'HP_Recovery', and moved on to try something else.

Going a step back, I chose the Copy (Copy BIOS image to any file location (Advanced users)) option. This option saved the bios files to my Desktop (after choosing it as the save location). These files were -

0849E.bin

0849E.s12

0852C.bin

0852C.s12

08498.bin

08498.s12

08656.bin

08656.s12

Their total size was 48 MB. Besides these 8 files, the utility had also created an 'EFI' folder, containing the BIOS Management utility of about 1.9 MB size,  in my windows partition (C:\).

Upto this point, I had no idea what to do with these files/folders. So doing a guesswork based on some previous experience and a BIOS manual update guide, I just copied the EFI folder to my Pendrive's root (not in some folder in it), and copied the above 8 files into a new folder named 'Hewlett-Packard' beside the EFI folder. (later I realized they were expected somewhere else).

Of course my Pendrive was not made bootable as the utility had failed to recognize it. (although now I'm not sure now if the utility makes it bootable at all, besides just 'copying' the files to correct locations). So trusting the EFI booting mechanism, I rebooted with the pendrive plugged in anyway. After which came the next problem -

3) No 'BIOS/Firmware Management' menu

After rebooting > tapping 'Esc' to get BIOS Startup menu > pressing 'F2' for 'System Diagnostics', I encountered a very simple DOS-like screen with Memory and HDD tests being the only two diagnostics options in it. No BIOS or Firmware Management option. I think this was because there was no HP_Recovery partition in my SSD, and the Pendrive, even though labelled 'HP_Recovery', was not bootable. So this menu was useless for me. So I moved on to try manually booting from the pendrive's EFI files.

4) Manual EFI Booting : BIOS Update fails

This time I chose 'F9' (boot device selection) from the startup menu, then 'Boot from EFI file' option. This option listed my pendrive as the only EFI boot option which I gladly chose. (the xubuntu on my ssd is a 'legacy mode' installation, not efi). However, instead of directly starting the Diagnostics/BIOS Management utility, it let me browse to the EFI file on my pendrive to boot from. I chose the BIOS Management Utility file (BiosMgmt.efi) located within the EFI folder on the pendrive -

EFI\HP\BIOSUpdate\BiosMgmt.efi

It booted fine, but failed to proceed with "BIOS file not found" (or a similar) message.

5) SUCCESS! Log file to the rescue.

I rebooted to try copying the BIOS files to some other location. But this time I found the newly created log file of the last failed attempt, in the EFI folder -

EFI\HP\BIOSUpdate\HpBiosUpdate.log

Among many other things, I found this line in the file -

Failed Reading BIOS Image EFI\HP\BIOS\New\08498.bin (Not Found)

So now I knew where to put the BIOS files, and exactly which one (08498.bin in my case, the others would be for other models). But I copied all the 8 files in the EFI\HP\BIOS\New\ folder just to be extra sure.

Rebooted to BIOS Startup menu > F9 > Boot from EFI file > Browsed to EFI\HP\BIOSUpdate\BiosMgmt.efi file, and this time it did boot to the much awaited BIOS Management Utility screen. It had found the new BIOS file, and in bold Red letters, it displayed this (or a similar) message -

An important bios update is pending.

After a timeout of 10 seconds (during which I could 'Cancel' the process), the update started automatically, with the warning to not interrupt the process. Description of this process (writing from memory) -

After copying the file to memory blocks and verifying it, the notebook rebooted itself.

After the reboot, the actual flashing of BIOS started.

After finishing that, the notebook rebooted 3 more times (if I remember correctly), with a few seconds intervals in-between.

During these 2-3 reboots after BIOS flashing, the screen remained blank, the LEDs kept flashing on each boot.

Next came my last, easy-fix problem -

6) New BIOS defaults : Needed change to match previous settings

The new BIOS obviously defaulted to EFI booting again, along with other factory defaults like 'Action Keys: on', 'Virtualization: off', 'Fan: always On' etc. This caused a boot failure as the Xubuntu installation on my SSD was non-EFI. To fix this, I simply entered the BIOS setup > changed the Boot mode to 'Legacy' (disabling 'Secure Boot'), along with changing the other mentioned settings (just my preferences, not necessary for booting). Rebooted > Entered the prompted code to accept the change > rebooted to my good old OS!

So far after this update I have only tried keeping the notebook powered-off, with the charger unplugged, for about half an hour. The date/time was correct after next boot. So I believe my problem is fixed. Though I can be fully confident only after keeping it powered off for more than 12 hours, which may not happen anytime soon. 🙂

UPDATE:

After testing the BIOS Update Utility (sp99212.exe) with Wine on linux, I found that it runs almost same as on XP 32 bit, throwing same errors and failing eventually the same way, but extracting the needed files which can be manually copied to the manually created EFI folder on the pen drive. This method can be used if no Windows PC is available to run the utility. Here's how -

1) On your Pen drive (formatted as FAT32), create these directories -

EFI/HP/BIOS/Current

EFI/HP/BIOS/New

EFI/HP/BIOS/Previous

EFI/HP/BIOSUpdate

EFI/HP/DEVFW/Current

EFI/HP/DEVFW/New

EFI/HP/DEVFW/Previous

2) Run the downloaded BIOS Update utility with Q4wine

3) After getting rid of the 32 error messages just like in step 1 above with Win XP, choose 'Copy' option to 'generate' the BIOS files and copy them to whichever folder you want (default is the 'Documents' folder in your Home directory).

4) Browse to the following location within your Home directory to copy the files required for EFI booting -

.wine/drive_c/users/(your username)/Temp/7zSxxx.tmp/CrisisFolder/

The xxx in the 7zS.. folder above can be any 3 characters, just look for the folder whose name starts with 7z..

5) Copy all the 5 files within the CrisisFolder to the EFI/HP/BIOSUpdate/ directory created in step 1 above.

6) Copy all the 8 files generated in step 3 above to the EFI/HP/BIOS/New/ directory created in step 1 above.

7) Close the app running on wine. Reboot to BIOS Startup menu and proceed with manual EFI booting as mentioned in step 5 of the main post above.