Driver downloads - how to do this manually without too much effort?

[rappel]

Hi,

many moons ago, in another life as an IT professional I used to come regularly to the HP website and was always impressed by the structure, indexing and ease of use to a) find support information and drivers and b) download one or more files that I needed to complete installations.

Recently, while repairing a friend's laptop (x360 15...) I've had cause to try to use HP support site again, twice. This has not been a happy time and I'm hoping someone can help me to make the second half of this easier because I need some drivers!

Whole story below - and I'd welcome any assist with any points raised (because I could well have made idiot mistakes) but the important one is the how to manually download drivers without hassle so I can complete helping my friend.

...If anyone responsible for creating the support infrastructure is around then please feel free to use this as customer feedback on the experience. The automated tools have added about 10 hours to a process that should take about 1 and have contributed absolutely nothing (ZERO) to the recovery process. Heck it's taken me longer so far to recover the OS than it has to recover user files from a 1 TB drive using recovery tools like R-Studio.

Thanks.

--------------

...Warning long post...

In a nutshell it was a disk failure with main partition destroyed but recovery and boot partitions intact. For some reason however the machine looped in self recovery and couldn't repair itself. So extracted disk, copied off what could be retrieved from the user data (no backup), copied good partitions to a new drive, leaviing unallocated area free for windows install. Of course, no recovery drive created either so I tried using cloud recovery on a different PC to create a recovery USB.

Try 1.

Basic prep dialogues, selected agree as required  but hadn't been asked which USB drive. then got a dialogue box saying not enough space on C: drive to write to, aborted. Being cautious I considered if this was a: trying to format and overwrite my C: drive or actually this was that it needed a temp area as part of the process. However nowhere in the requirements on the HP site did it mention any free space requirement on the C: or system oe temp drive.

Searching threw up 9000 copies of "this is how to use HPs cloud recovery tool" but none mentioned any requirement. finally after 45 minutes I found one that gave a bit more info and said there was a 20GB free space requirement on system drive.

Encouraged, I freed up space on the C: drive and tried again.

Try 2.

This time I could select the USB drive! Great. Then downlaod started. About 1.5 hours into the process I returned to find the message that usb creation had failed and an error code. Asked me to submit this to HP. Decided to try once more.

Try 3.

Same delay, same result. So I looked at content of USB and it kind of looked OK. Ignored error message and tried booting laptop.

Laptop ran a different auto repair and at the end I still had a loop but many more options for recovery. Unfortunately none of them resulted in a working, booting OS.

Decided that maybe the USB install was actually only 90%, maybe it wasn't right and tried one final time.

Try 4.

No different. I then tried to send the errors message, log and zip file to HP support as requested.

No useful contact page that enables me to do so. So I signed up for a support ID. went through contact and was then asked which device. So I had to add a device, which I duly did. At this point of course there was no warranty and all contact options seem to disappear again. I really couldn't find any way to submit the error messages. anyone know how?

This is now 12 hours later... so I decide to go with an MS OS install. The recovery partition and auto processes don't seem to be adding much ease of recovery so I may as well give back a few GB of disk space.

30 minutes later  I've installed Win 10 twice (forgot to not set networking first time to avoid the MS account creation dance) and got the laptop up and running in basic form.

Now I needed drivers but sleep first...

Today I have been on the hp support site again trying to get hold of drivers. I want these on my PC on my network so that if I have to do this again I have at least old copies of these. Also, I don't want to enable networking in the laptop until I've got the AV setup which for me comes last of the setup activities.

I'm not a fan of most auto update software for drivers as they tend to add bloatware as well, and it's not going to be on the actual laptop either so auto detect isn't going to work. this is where I found that the HP site has changed quite significantly. Sure getting to the files is still quick and easy but downloading them??

I tried initally to download these manually and it took a while to navigate through the various pop-up dialogues to understand that if I don't want to install the install assistant on my PC (and it says I can use it on another PC than the target) then for each file I have to click download and then cancel 2 sometimes 3 dialogues, then select I will download this manually, then I get to an actual download. With the speed of the site that's about 2 minutes a file before downloading begins.

It wouldn't be so bad if the "remember this decision" on the manual download dialogue was honoured, but it's not. So each time I'm first prompted to download the install assistant framework...

It wouldn't be so bad if the mutiple download option worked so that I only went through the sequence once - bnut it doesn't, it only downloads the last selected file in the list.

So having got four files in and then got to the chipset section, where I need about 10 files and then there are 10 other sections (ish) I tried to install the install assistant.

This installed the framework and then said install of install assistant failed, will try later. Tried several times. Tried rebooting in case it needed to update system DLLs etc but no scheduled reinstall. Tried fresh install immediately after in case but no. Unistalled framework and abandoned.

How to manually download 1 (or all) the driver files for a device quickly and simply in a manual fashion??

[CharlieItuah1]

Hi, @rappel you can find all the drivers that you need here and they are all manual installation.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-pavilion-15-bk000-x360-convertible-pc/10862175/m...

[rappel]

Thanks for the response.

I know that's where the drivers are.

That's where I went and encountered the issues I was describing.

For example, click the download the BIOS link:

look at what it is trying to download in the save dialogue.

If I close the save dialogue and then hit continue in the main dialogue I get:

Note the animated red dialogue (or image??) at the top right, which does absolutely nothing if you click it and points to nothing useful at all.

If you close it you go back to the main dialogue. Hit continue, this loops. Hit Close then you get:

Took me three goes to realise that the No thanks message is actually a link, which if you click it takes you to a real save dialogue box from where I can save the ONE file. Took me until many attempts when I tried the get started, which gives you the same dialogue to save a real file, but slightly quicker. I had avoided this because the text implies it will use the assistant.

If I check the Don't ask again box it makes absolutely NO difference. I have to go through this every time.

Finally, when the download completes, the options are:

Clicking on the "download more drivers" link takes you back to the main driver screen for the model, which then spends about 20 seconds reloading it's list, which you then have to open the section you want etc.

I also tried the browser back button but it does the same thing,  rather than just present what was there before, the page auto loads each time. It really doesn't need to be that dynamic.

It's not that I can't find what I want, it's just that it's a long list that I have to download one at a time because the mutiple file download doesn't seem to work and for each it takes me through the two dialogues then the save dialogue with pauses between and then resets the driver list each time I loop back to get the next one.

There's got to be an easier way than this... A zipped file of the lot or an FTP site is so much simpler and quicker...

It seems 20 years has taken us backwards. Is there any other option than this sequence that I'm missing?

[rappel]

... and yes I could probably have downloaded all the files in the time it's taken to write both these posts, but I am trying to vent some frustration as politely as possible because of all the other issues I've experienced with the automated software that's supposed to make life easier...

I'm also double checking I'm not being a complete idiot here as well.

[CharlieItuah1]

Hi, @rappel I can understand your frustration, but have you tried using the support assistant to download the file. It could actually work out for you?

Just give it a shot.

[rappel]

Yep, in the first post I said the install fails. It's hidden in the long post I know but it just don't install.

As I said, two supposed to be helpful utilities have cost me about 10 hours trying to get them to work.

[CharlieItuah1]

At this point, your best shot may be the HP Support Assistant then.

[rappel · Accepted solution]

In case this helps anyone else...

Trying to read the notes on one chipset driver I accidentally discovered that:

Iif you expand an individual item in the download list to read the description, then the download is also presented as a file name link in the text. This is a direct download link (As opposed to the download link in the list presentation which tries to give you the "helpful" software).
This still results in a refresh on the driver list, so to get round that simply right click (in Firefox) to open the filename download link in a new tab  and you get both a direct download and keep your place in the list without refreshing.

Much quicker, and keeps a context on what you are downloading.

(Almost how it was 20 years ago...)