Notebook Software and How To Questions

A great many older HP Laptop models have the following problem:

1) Installation of Windows 10 or Windows 11 (forced override) on them results in "Unknown Device" in Device Manager with an ID of ACPI\HPQ6000\3&b1bfb68&0  or some variation containing HPQ6000

2) Research shows this belongs to the "HP Mobile Data Protection Sensor"

3) Going to the Support Page and installing the driver for the model either fails, or comes back with an error during Windows Boot that the driver has a known problem with your version of windows, resulting in the driver being disabled.

4) Various hacks of attempting to update to a newer driver from Device Manager result in "Driver Not Found" messages or "You already have the best driver for this device loaded" even though the OS won't allow the driver to load.

What does this driver do?:

The driver reads the accelerator sensor in the laptop and if it senses that the laptop is falling off the table or some such, it sends a Park command to the hard driver.  If the drive parks before the laptop hits the floor then it might result in saving the drive from a head crash.   This sensor does nothing useful if you have upgraded your laptop to a SATA SSD

Why is this happening:

The problem happens because HP used a large variety of different Hardware IDs for this sensor even though the sensor chip was never changed, and every mag media hard disk responds the same to a Park command.  With older laptops, the device driver's INF file is coded to the Hardware ID used so the driver will be loaded.  However, many of the older drivers were never Signed.  So, while you can run the installer and install the older driver under Windows 10/11/etc. on boot Windows detects the unsigned driver and disables it

Fix:

1) Download the Mobile Data Protection sensor driver for your machine.   For example, using a HP ProBook 4440s, that would be SP71714

2) Run the installer and let it install and activate the driver.

3) Reboot.  Go into Device Manager, and verify that the Mobile Data Protection driver is showing, but that it is disabled.  Go into Properties of the driver and Driver Details you will see that

c:\windows\system32\drivers\accelerometer.sys

and

c:\windows\system32\drivers\hpdskflt.sys

are both showing with red circles with ! in them, indicating a problem with the driver

4) Download SP88981 from HP and run it.  It will extract to C;\SWSetup\SP8898

Now, at this point most of the guides out there say to go into Device Manager, and Update the driver and point it to this directory, and it will load the driver and be happy.  However, this ONLY works on a small number of models of laptops because SP88981 is not a generic installer for the accelerometer driver and it's INF files do not have all Device IDs in them.  It DOES NOT work for the ProBook 4440s for example

5) Browse in File Manager to windows\system32\drivers and right click on the hpdskflt.sys and accelerometer.sys drivers and rename them with a .sys.bak backup file extension.  Approve the override when it asks.

6) Copy the contents of C:\SWSetup\SP88981\base\amd64  (if running Windows 64 bit) or C:\SWSetup\SP88981\base\x86 (if running Windows 32 bit) over to c:\windows\system32\drivers.

7) Reboot the machine.  If it blue-screens (and it is Windows 10) then let it reboot a few times and at the 3rd time it will ask you if you want to do Troubleshooting, say yes, then go into Windows 10 Command line, and at the command line cd to c:\windows\system32\drivers and delete the 2 drivers you copied over.  It WILL blue screen if you use the incorrect driver for your architecture (that is, you use the 32 bit driver instead of the 64 bit driver or vis-versa)   Note that either driver goes into system32 as Microsoft uses system32 for both 32 bit and 64 bit drivers.

The newer driver in SP88981 is signed so it works fine under Windows 10 latest build.  And clearly HP didn't change the sensor chips in the laptop.

Note that this problem has been discussed here (and a few other places) but as those threads are all too old they don't allow posting updates:

Solved: HP accelerometer and Windows 10 - Page 12 - HP Support Community - 6267595