BIOS update F.2E sp77453 bricked my Envy DV7

[NewSeeker]

Spoiler: successful recovery story here !

I am the VERY recent owner of a new-to-me DV7 7300, which is hugely exciting to me for the following reasons:

1) my Dell Latitude E5520 is literally being held together with duct tape, and it's embarrassing to be seen with it.

2) it will absolutely NOT run Win 10 (believe me, I tried it).

3) I had upgraded it in every way I could, including loading 16 gb of RAM (double the spec Dell provides), installing an i5-2520M cpu (I was going to try something hotter, but I'm pretty sure it would have ended in a puddle of melted plastic - Dell laptops are notorious for poor cooling), and using a mock CD caddy to load the second of two 4tb SSD drives. It was impressive for what it had become, but I finally hit the absolute limit there.

4) the screen was a paltry 15.5 at 1366x768, and my eyes aren't getting younger.

5) I had already purchased a second battery for it, both of them were pretty well done, and I wasn't going in for another.

Imagine my delight when I succeeded in winning a DV7t-7300 CTO Quad with an i7-3230QM for the princely sum of $61. That's about as good as it gets. OK, it didn't have the Nvidia card or a touch screen. Will that ruin my life ?

The day it arrived, however, my life did change. It became vastly better.

It is in great condition. It has a ginormous 17.3 screen at 1600x900. It has (count them) TWO legitimate drive bays AND I don't need to drag around an external CD player. The battery lasts the whole day. It came with Win 10 installed, and it runs beautifully. I goosed the RAM up to 16gb, and now it's even better. I'm not sure if HP is like Dell in that they underreport what the machine will actually load, but I'm going to find out, because I have a 16gb SODIMM on the way. If THAT works, I'll be delirious.

Here's where I ran into some self-inflicted pain.

Like any good sysadmin, one of the FIRST things I did was to check the BIOS version, because if the machine is going to support resources beyond the published specs, the magic will be in the BIOS.

Mine was f.29, but I soon discovered that f.2e was the last published version.

Now HP has done a spectacularly nasty thing in removing, if not deleting, EVERYTHING related to older hardware. There is really no reason to do that. Terabytes of data cost them nothing to host, and the web traffic would be just about imperceptible, but it WOULD engender HUGE good will, just like it does for Dell and other manufacturers who keep positively ANCIENT resources up there. Companies state clearly that end-of-support means just that, and that you proceed at your own risk, so if you slip and fall over there, you can sue yourself. That's certainly fair.

Good will is all about giving, and if that giving takes nothing out of your pocket, an executive who makes the poor choice to cut off years of helpful information has clearly not read Dale Carnegie's book.

Imagine my distress when I discovered that virtually NOTHING in terms of resources was available for my shiny new laptop, particularly the manual or that must-have BIOS update.

Well, Google is everybody's friend, and a day of digging produced both of those items.

Now not one, but TWO discussions here detailed the sad and painful end to which some of these DV7 laptops have come as a result of eating the forbidden fruit of SP77453, the f.2e BIOS.

Did I heed those warnings ? Nooooo, I had to be the genius who got away with it. Torpedos be damned, full speed ahead.

Sure enough, exactly as described in that discussion, I ran the update, the blue progress bar marched across the screen, the message said that the machine would reboot.

And so it did.

And then ... nothing. The dark void. The black hole. The amber light on the F12 key, the fan spinning, and the screen like ebony.

Exactly as described in the discussion.

What an idiot. One day after this buy of the century dropped into my hands for pennies, I had reduced it to a doorstop, with no way out.

I shut it off and rebooted. Nothing.

I tried the Win+b and Win+v keys. Nothing.

I tried the recovery USB which I had the foresight to create before applying the update, in addition to copying the existing BIOS to backup files. Nothing.

I tried a rain dance. Still nothing.

Then I reread the discussion carefully, and noticed two things. One of them mentioned disconnecting the CMOS battery, which I tried, with no apparent effect.

The other thing I noticed was mention of a recovery resulting from using the original hard drive. I was in the boat with the poor slob who did not have an original drive.

So I did what I thought the machine would find most confusing. I disconnected the hard drive.

BANG !

The machine booted. Step one was that a message came up about updating the BIOS, with progress that went to 100%. Step two was that it said "where the heck is my hard drive ?"

It takes a lot to make me shake, but I was way out ahead of the jello. I might have cried, but there was the last critical step.

So I reconnected the drive and rebooted.

The sucker came right up. There is nothing quite like revival of the dead.

Even more amazing, it turns out that the BIOS was not rolled back. It indeed shows as f.2e

As a consequence of HP's bad attitude, I won't get to find out what changes were made to the newest BIOS version.

But I absolutely will try and push the RAM to 32gb, and since this version of the machine actually has a socketed CPU, I'm going to see how far I can push that too.

I shall return with updates.

A number of vendors report that an m.2 socket exists in this laptop, and I'm not taking it apart just now, but at some point I surely will.

In the meantime I'll satisfy myself with replacing the awful Ralink wifi card with a WiFi 6 / Bluetooth card. Does the Bluetooth need an antenna ? I think so. I'll burn that bridge when I get there.

[Pallipurath]

Hi @NewSeeker,

Welcome to the HP Support Community.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share this remarkable recovery story and what an adventure it was. We truly appreciate the level of detail, passion, and persistence you put into bringing your Pavilion dv7t-7300 back to life. Stories like yours are a testament to how resourceful and determined our customers can be, and we're genuinely glad to hear that your system is up and running again after what must have been a nerve-wracking moment.

That said, we do want to set expectations carefully.
The Pavilion dv7t-7300 series was discontinued around 2013, and it has been classified as an obsolete product for several years now. As a result, HP no longer hosts active support files for this model on our website, including drivers, BIOS updates, and documentation. Once a product reaches this stage of the lifecycle, HP is no longer able to maintain or redistribute firmware or BIOS revisions, and this is why many of those resources are no longer accessible directly from our servers.

We understand the frustration this can cause, especially for users like you who continue to keep this hardware alive far beyond its original design expectations. Your feedback about legacy support is heard, and we will ensure it is forwarded to the appropriate internal teams.

Despite the limitations, we’re truly glad that your system recovered after disconnecting the drive, and that the BIOS reflash completed successfully. For upgrades such as RAM, CPU, Wi-Fi cards, and internal storage, we recommend proceeding carefully, as HP does not provide official validation for hardware configurations beyond the original specifications for this series. But it’s clear you are comfortable exploring those boundaries, just be mindful of thermal limits and hardware compatibility.

If you have any further questions about the system, or run into any issues along the way, feel free to reach out. We're always happy to help however we can within the scope of what’s still supported.

And once again, congratulations on the resurrection of the dv7. Not every “doorstop moment” has such a satisfying ending!
 

Regards,

Pallipurath.

[NewSeeker]

I'm going to respond to what you wrote above:

"Thank you so much for taking the time to share this remarkable recovery story and what an adventure it was. We truly appreciate the level of detail, passion, and persistence you put into bringing your Pavilion dv7t-7300 back to life. Stories like yours are a testament to how resourceful and determined our customers can be, and we're genuinely glad to hear that your system is up and running again after what must have been a nerve-wracking moment."

yes, I wrote it up because other people who paid good money for your product might need that information, and since YOU, meaning HP, deleted all of the information there was, it provided information you refused to in spite of the money you made selling the product.

"That said, we do want to set expectations carefully. The Pavilion dv7t-7300 series was discontinued around 2013, and it has been classified as an obsolete product for several years now. As a result, HP no longer hosts active support files for this model on our website, including drivers, BIOS updates, and documentation."

set expectations ??? anyone who pays good money for a product has the expectation that the vendor will do what they can to support that product, especially when it costs the vendor NOTHING.

"Once a product reaches this stage of the lifecycle, HP is no longer able to maintain or redistribute firmware or BIOS revisions, and this is why many of those resources are no longer accessible directly from our servers."

no longer able ??? yes, you are absolutely ABLE. you choose not to, and that is a poor executive decision, a poor way to treat customers who have paid for your products, and a poor reflection on HP as a whole in terms of the way they treat customers.

there is exactly NO reason for removing the support material from public access. if you want to advise customers that you no longer support the hardware in any way, shape or form, that is acceptable, and customers will have no problems with that, or expectations of help.

Dell continues to provide support for hardware that is much older than the DV7. So does Lenovo. So do any number of other Fortune 500 vendors. As an infrastructure manager, why would I consider buying hardware from a company that treats customers so badly ? I buy thousands of units over the period of a year, and up at the top of my priority list for choosing a vendor is the way I'm going to be treated. why would I deal with a company that could have left resources in place which cost them NOTHING, but didn't ?

"We understand the frustration this can cause, especially for users like you who continue to keep this hardware alive far beyond its original design expectations."

you don't understand ANYTHING about frustration, or you wouldn't have done what you did.

there are SO MANY customers who post their unhappiness over the unnecessary grief you have caused them. you are not paying attention at all.

what you fail to consider is that there are people like me among the customers you have done this to, who actually have budget control over a lot of corporate money. when you do this kind of thing, they just take that money and go someplace else.

  
"Your feedback about legacy support is heard, and we will ensure it is forwarded to the appropriate internal teams."

you are WAY late to that party. what you COULD do is restore all of the information you took down from your archives. maybe some of those customers who, unknown to you, have real disposable budgets, might come back and consider buying from you again.

"Despite the limitations, we’re truly glad that your system recovered after disconnecting the drive, and that the BIOS reflash completed successfully."

you're glad because it cost you no effort. hopefully, someone else in the same predicament will get to see this - unless you take this down too.

"For upgrades such as RAM, CPU, Wi-Fi cards, and internal storage, we recommend proceeding carefully, as HP does not provide official validation for hardware configurations beyond the original specifications for this series."

I frequently push the limits published by vendors for hardware, and often discover that much more is supported than is published. while it's true that there are real considerations for issues like heat, most of the upgrades work just fine.

as an example, I just upgraded the low end wifi card to an Intel AX210, and it works flawlessly.

"But it’s clear you are comfortable exploring those boundaries, just be mindful of thermal limits and hardware compatibility."

hard to know what the compatibility range is if you take down all of the information.

"If you have any further questions about the system, or run into any issues along the way, feel free to reach out."

seriously ? you want to know if I have questions about a system you just finished stating very clearly that you have no intention of helping me with, and for which you have taken away all of the resources there were.

"We're always happy to help however we can within the scope of what’s still supported."

in other words, not only not happy to help with what you just asked me to reach out about, but determined NOT to help.

"And once again, congratulations on the resurrection of the dv7. Not every “doorstop moment” has such a satisfying ending!"

NO THANKS TO YOU.