HP Pavilion Recover from failed BIOS update
NOTE: I have never personally had the chance (what a chance…) to try this recovery procedure, however I’ve found multiple references of people having successfully tested it, even on HP Pavilion laptops. If it doesn’t work for you please report it both here and to those who’ve had direct experience of it, I’m sorry I cannot assist you on this.
In case of a failed BIOS update (or a broken BIOS upgrade) you get a dumb laptop with a blank screen. A few people have successfully tried the following procedure to recover their laptop in this scenario:
Remove your hard disk and your battery.
You should force the system to boot from either the FLOPPY, CDROM or a FlashDrive.
Download and unzip B1800 crisis recovery disk and be sure you replace the provided bios (BIOS.WPH) file with your laptop most current bios file (Phoenix only). Note that you should first extract from the BIOS updater exe tool the BIOS ROM, then rename your ROM as BIOS.WPH.
Use crisdisk tool to create a bootable diskette and a bootable floppy with the files phlash.exe, minidos.sys and (your bios file) bios.wph will be created for you
Held Win+B key (other report the key combination being Fn+B)
plug in AC adaptor
Push the power button, with the two other buttons still down.
If the power led start, release the ‘Fn’and ‘B’ button.
If you’re lucky, you’ll hear lots of beeps…. Your computer will reset itself and start in Windows!! can take 5 to 10 minutes so be patient.
Powered on, it did some beeping then I saw the light access of my flash drive, when the light stop I released win+b, it did some beeping then the cpu fan quick in (I knew then I was in good shape because it’s the sound it make when the bios is flashing) then it stop and more beeping for 30 secs then it powered itself off .. done!
If the booting doesn’t succeed, try a different timing on releasing the ‘Fn’ and ‘B’ button.
Related posts:
- HP Pavilion BIOS changelogs and download links
- HP Pavilion BIOS hack for silencing the fan
- HP Pavilion laptops BIOS DSDT hack
- TrustedCore BIOS è di default sui portatili HP Pavilion
- HP Pavilion overclock nVidia video card
- TrustedCore BIOS is the default on HP Pavilions
- Linux Power Saving Tweaks for HP Pavilion laptops
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replace the provided bios (BIOS.WPH) file with your laptop most current bios file (Phoenix only). Note that you should first extract from the BIOS updater exe tool the BIOS ROM, then rename your ROM as BIOS.WPH
i get lost here how can i find the bios.wph file if my laptop is in black screen, i cant acsess windows or anything at all .
Hi Rene!
You don’t need your pavilion laptop in order to extract the bios files. You may use any other computer downloading the BIOS package and either unpacking it or executing it. Of course you shouldn’t install the BIOS, I guess it will prompt you itself there is nothing to update. However in the meantime it would have unpacked the bios files in C:\SWSETUP\spNNNNN\SWinFlash (NNNN stands for the number of the installer). Over there you would find a file named BIOS.WPH
Wish you a good luck and please report if you succeed or find some other troubles in recovering your laptop!
Is it possible to make a USB stick instead of a floppy?
Mikkelsen, I don’t think so.
USB needs to be managed by the BIOS and if it is bricked theorically it couldn’t work.
I have never tried this though.
Thanks for this article, now I guess I’ll just have to cycle 3 km to a shop to get my laptop working (better than using a 5 year old compaq desktop anyway!)
You’re really a life saviour, will post whether it worked or not, later
. I want to play NFS:WO beta with my laptop. Yes, I’m the Carl that got from lvl 1 to 19 in a 37 min pursuit xD)
(it’s prefect timing, too, for finding this article