BIOS Driver update

[matijanfs]

Hey, i installed HP Assistant, since i wanted to intall all drivers my laptop needs. Everything went smoothly until it came BIOS  driver update. Error message came that said i dont have enough memory to install this driver, even though i just installed operating system and have over 400GB of free space

[Jupitero]

Hello.

The BIOS is updated using an EFI partition in your storage drive, and the space there is limited. EFI is a special boot partition Windows uses for starting up, and it contains vital boot files.

Windows installation set the boot partition size at 100MB which is enough for Windows, but PC manufacturers such as HP also use the EFI partition for their diagnostics and BIOS/Firmware updates. The EFI partition is 300-400MB on a Windows that HP preloads in the factory, which is quite sufficient and still a minuscule amount of today's drives.

When you update the BIOS in a HP computer, it actually places the updates on EFI and on reboot the laptop reboots to the BIOS update environment from there. Similarly if you install HP UEFI Diagnostics package, it is installed into the EFI partition and when you invoke the diagnostics during startup, the laptop restarts using the diagnostics boot files in there.

EFI partition is a standard FAT32 partition but because it is placed before the main C drive on your storage, it cannot easily be extended.

Your options to update the BIOS at this point is to either

- create a USB drive with the BIOS update and use it to update the laptop;

- try to clean up the EFI partition.

To create the USB drive you only need to download the latest BIOS from HP 250 G10 drivers webpage run it and follow the instructions. Obviously you need a spare USB drive/stick as well.

The clean up the EFI partition you need to start a command line as administrator.

To mount the EFI partition as Z: drive, type the following command:

mountvol z: /S

(If you  already have a Z drive, use another free drive letter)

Either via command line or Windows File Explorer, check the EFI folder contents. If you see a HP folder, you may delete it. This will remove the UEFI diagnostics and its log files, and also possible earlier BIOS version if you have updated the BIOS after last Windows re-installation. HP UEFI diagnostics can always be reinstalled back there.

The BOOT and Microsoft folders are reserved for Windows, so do not touch them!

Deleting or modifying any files in them will likely cause Windows to not boot anymore.

After you have deleted the HP folder, I strongly recommend to unmount the EFI partition with command:

mountvol z: /D

No need to reboot, try updating the BIOS again with the Assistant.

Please report back with success or failures!