HP Probook BIOS Upgrade 1.17 failed

[UniteZack]

Thanks, was it just a case of connect onto the chip and flash?

[Fr4nk78]

Hi to all. 

Same issue here! (probook455g7, Italy), after the assistant initiated update of the last week.

A sudden change from a perfectly working state into a deadly useless state occurred.

After several days of contacts with HP phone assistance, and following multiple suggested interventions, nothing worked.

Since the machine is out of warranty, the proposed solution is a rather expensive motherboard replacement.

This would certainly solve the issue (until the next official virulent BIOS update). Given the origin of the problem, I believe HP should reconsider and provide genuine assistance to their customers.

However, if anyone could kindly provide more details about the flashing operation, location of the chip, connection to the chip, etc., it would be greatly appreciated.

[Andreas---]

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[Dioxaz]

Hello, I wanted to inform the community that I successfully revived one Probook 455 G7 using a CH341A programmer, but it involved me removing the chip from the motherboard. I detailed the process in another thread.

Edit: My second attempt was unfortunately not successful, as the second machine won't turn on and will instead make Caps and Num lock LEDs blink 7 times, all that with the charge LED being permanently lit in white all the time. I couldn't find any worthwhile info on the net for the moment regarding that error code.

[Wojtek0586]

Hi Dioxaz, thanks for Your work!

It can be very useful!

I am surprised by the fact that HP has not made an official statement on this topic. These laptops are approaching 3 years old, we have literally a dozen or so days left in which they are covered by the manufacturer's warranty. What about units that are already out of warranty? The official update broke working equipment, who will pay for the repair? The scale of the phenomenon seems to be very large and concerns the entire world. Could this be planned obsolescence of the product?

[Animal_JC]

I too suffered the BIOS update death last Wednesday 22nd May

I took the SSD HDD out and put it in an external enclosure and all my files were there including a folder named SWSetup which has all the previous BIOS bin files so I can roll back if I can get the BIOS chip flashed

Going to contact HP today and see what they propose to do about their THEIR software bricking MY 3 year old perfectly functioning laptop

[itscout49]

Thank you Dioxaz for your research and detailed description under:
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Boot-and-Lockup/Bios-update-crash-problem-HP-ProBook-445-G7/m...

At the German Support Website for the HP ProBook 445 G7, HP have replaced the malicious BIOS Patch V1.17 against V1.06.02. I am wondering about this numbering, as the last Patch was V1.16.

For me "unsolder" the BIOS Chip of a prior fully working system which still has a market value of EUR 400,- is no option, because this will be fully onto my risk. I think with the customer reply of roughly 100 demaged Business Class Notebooks it is clear what is responsible for the "sudden death" of so many systems.

I now try to escalade this to the German HP Management.

Thank you and best regards from Frankfurt Area

[tcsenter]

Better get screen captures of this thread before HP locks and deletes it. This is NOT the first instance of new BIOS introducing troubles on 455 G7. e.g.

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Video-Display-and-Touch/HP-Elitebook-G7-G8-series-issues-with...

[Dioxaz]

---

@Wojtek0586 wrote:

Hi Dioxaz, thanks for Your work!

It can be very useful!

I am surprised by the fact that HP has not made an official statement on this topic. These laptops are approaching 3 years old, we have literally a dozen or so days left in which they are covered by the manufacturer's warranty. What about units that are already out of warranty? The official update broke working equipment, who will pay for the repair? The scale of the phenomenon seems to be very large and concerns the entire world. Could this be planned obsolescence of the product?

---

It looks like there has been an official statement according to a previous post. But I have no idea of where this was published. Me too can't believe we're the only ones in those threads who ended up with bricked 455 G7s, this incident must have struck potentially millions of machines. However I can't seem to find anything related on the internet for the moment.

Fun fact: when this incident struck me a few days ago with two users at work reporting bricked machines due to a bad BIOS update, I thought I was the only one, started to panic and doubt my IT asset management skills. Just think of it, that dreaded BIOS update even escaped the GPO I made preventing driver updates, and we're indeed running a WSUS server with manually approved updates. How could that be? Well, a smile came back to my face when a teammate alerted me that HP deleted the BIOS update from their servers. Then I saw this thread, then another one, and another one... and I finally realised. 🙂

And yep, my initial searches leading me to clueless people advising to use a GPO to prevent BIOS updates. I don't think they have any idea of what they're talking about (especially with that dreaded “Native OS Firmware Update Service” functionality). Speaking of which, that will be our next task: setting that “Native OS Firmware Update Service” to off on all machines we can in order to disable the UEFI Capsule BIOS update for good.

[fiwkfcw434]

I would suggest everyone to contact HP customer support and create ticket about the bios issue: https://www.hp.com/us-en/contact-hp/contact.html Write notice of defect of the broken bios. In my case (Finnish company customer and laptop manufacturer warranty has expired) they still provided good will onsite service. A new motherboard will be replaced into laptop. It will take some time to wait a new motherboard and technician will be provided onsite to make repairing of the laptop. Hope they act elsewhere the same way.