Linux HP Elitebook 2570p - UEFI BIOS update failed and risky workaround

[forumspam]

I don't know if I did this right but I wanted to describe the steps, issues and workarounds I had to do to update my BIOS on my HP Elitebook 2570p laptop running Linux.

First, I downloaded the sp88111.exe from the product support page on another computer running Windows.  First, I had to pick Windows as the OS on the support page because apparently they don't care about Linux and the latest BIOS recommended for Linux is from 2013.

Next, I ran the installer and selected to install to a USB flash drive to update via UEFI.

Booted up my Elitebook into UEFI and navigated through the USB drive to BIOSUpdate/HpBiosUpdate32.efi which loaded the BIOS updater.  At this point it gave some error so I booted the laptop into Linux and looked at the USB drive.

Fortunately, HP puts a couple of log files on the USB drive of your update attempts on the USB drive.

The HPBiosUpdate.log file under root doesn't tell you anything, however the one under HEWLETT-PACKARD\BiosUpdate\HpBiosUpdate.log tells you stuff.

It starts telling you stuff that it's missing files.  I think the UEFI option in the installer doesn't copy the actual BIOS update because it's looking for files in \Hewlett-Packard\BIOS\New\ - namely 68ISB.bin

There's nothing in that folder so where did it go?  Nothing on the USB drive is a bin file.  So I go back to the Windows box and look at the sp88111.exe updating executable and extract it in 7zip.  There's a file called ROM.CAB so I now open it in 7zip.  Within are efibios.sig, rom.bin, rom.sig, ver.sig, ver.txt.  So this looks like the actual firmware update so I assume the flash utility isn't prepping the USB device completely.  These files should be in that Hewlett-Packard\BIOS\New\ folder so I pull them out of the .CAB file and drop them into the proper folder on the USB device.

Now, after a few attempts and reading the logs I kept seeing that it was looking for these sorts of files but with the name 68ISB.bin, 68ISB.s12, 68ISB.sig.

Ok.  So I rename rom.bin to 68ISB.bin, rom.sig to 68ISB.sig, and oddly I looked around and saw a file named HpBiosUpdate.s12 that is 256 bytes in the HEWLETT-PACKARD\BiosUpdate folder.  So I copied it over to my New folder and renamed it 68ISB.s12.  Somehow all of this worked and I'm now flashed to the latest version.

Hopefully HP takes a look at this and sees something isn't right.

in short:

support & downloads site doesn't keep the Linux section for bios updates up-to-date.

USB creator requires Windows to create a usb updater.

USB creator doesn't completely prepare the USB drive- doesn't put the actual BIOS update in the correct folder and name them properly.

Once in the UEFI boot screen you have to navigate through to the path on the USB drive to specifically load the correct EFI file to then launch the updater.