Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2012 21:28:22 +0100 Subject: Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain From: Idwer Vollering vid...@gmail.com To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, flash...@flashrom.org Another approach is to use an external SPI programmer: http://flashrom.org/Supported_programmers The 'downside' of this is that you need to take your laptop apart. ODM schematics of your laptop are found here: http://notebookschematic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/6515b_6715s.png Downloads for BIOS updates: http://h2.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=encc=usprodNameId=3356623prodTypeId=321957prodSeriesId=3368539swLang=13taskId=135swEnvOID=1093#120 and ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp55501-56000/sp6.exe My guess (I am not a HP service technician) is that you need ROM.CAB/Rom.bin from sp6.exe - you can use 7zip to extract Rom.bin This is probably way beyond my skills, but thanks anyway. Anton ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 15:44:19 -0700 (PDT) From: Jakub Lach jakub_l...@mailplus.pl To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain More civilised notebook manufactures usually provide also self booting (CD) image to update BIOS (e.g. Lenovo/ThinkPad). ok, I get the message, thanks. Anton ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
I've HP compaq 6715s laptop. It's all right with 10-current. I've got wireless and at one point I even managed to get flash working. My problem is with BIOS. Apparently it's wrong and John Baldwin provided me with a pci.c patch to get it to boot. There is an updated BIOS version, but so far I failed to get it installed. HP only provide MS and freedos executables. I tried BartPE - doesn't work. I tried plugging in a MS disk - doesn't work. The only think I haven't tried is getting a spare disk, installing freedos on it and then running the freedos executable from USB - what a fucking pain... For proper hardware (servers) HP provide images which are executed from management console, but not for laptops. I guess the idea that one might use their laptops for anything other than MS is so wild, that it never crossed their maid. Anyway, I think I've heard there are some laptops with no BIOS, is this true? Or perhaps there are brands where BIOS reflash is not such a great pain? I remember on Compaq Armada the BIOS was stored on disk and Compaq provided a floppy image to boot from and reflash BIOS. That was easy. Anything like this exist these days? Are there any EFI laptops? Any model people would recommend? Thanks Anton Another approach is to use an external SPI programmer: http://flashrom.org/Supported_programmers The 'downside' of this is that you need to take your laptop apart. ODM schematics of your laptop are found here: http://notebookschematic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/6515b_6715s.png Downloads for BIOS updates: http://h2.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=encc=usprodNameId=3356623prodTypeId=321957prodSeriesId=3368539swLang=13taskId=135swEnvOID=1093#120 and ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp55501-56000/sp6.exe My guess (I am not a HP service technician) is that you need ROM.CAB/Rom.bin from sp6.exe - you can use 7zip to extract Rom.bin ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
From cpgh...@cordula.ws Thu Oct 25 03:40:28 2012 Heh... ;-) (U)EFI is nothing new for us old farts: we've had OpenBoot[1] on Sun hardware for ages, and even though it didn't limit us w.r.t. the OS you wanted to boot (that's why you can install FreeBSD/sparc64 on used Sun machines), it had its issues too. Mainly that it needed a counter-part in hardware peripherals. E.g.: without F-Code in ROM, a PCI-based frame buffer wouldn't be usable there, because it wouldn't reply to the OpenBoot queries. The point is that firmware CAN be a mini-OS and more powerful than PC-BIOS. There's nothing wrong with that, and the flexibility of OFW/OpenBoot was for us sysadmins invaluable, esp. with diskless machines. What's wrong, is UEFI's DRM-scheme used to prevent non-signed code to be loaded... without mandating in the specs that the BIOS vendor MUST allow the device owner to add his/her own keys to it. That's the evil part of it. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware I'm probably missing something here. ia64 uses EFI, but there's nothing about checking for non-signed code. I can boot VMS, FreeBSD, linux, etc. And, by the way, firmware updates from EFI via e.g. USB flash drives is trivial on ia64. Perhaps what you are describing is not about the EFI specification iteself, but what different manufacturers add on top of it? Anton ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
On 25 Oct 2012, at 08:52, Anton Shterenlikht me...@bristol.ac.uk wrote: I'm probably missing something here. ia64 uses EFI, but there's nothing about checking for non-signed code. I can boot VMS, FreeBSD, linux, etc. And, by the way, firmware updates from EFI via e.g. USB flash drives is trivial on ia64. Perhaps what you are describing is not about the EFI specification iteself, but what different manufacturers add on top of it? It's in the latest UEFI spec - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Secure_boot . -- Bruce Cran ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
From br...@cran.org.uk Thu Oct 25 09:22:33 2012 On 25 Oct 2012, at 08:52, Anton Shterenlikht me...@bristol.ac.uk wrote: I'm probably missing something here. ia64 uses EFI, but there's nothing about checking for non-signed code. I can boot VMS, FreeBSD, linux, etc. And, by the way, firmware updates from EFI via e.g. USB flash drives is trivial on ia64. Perhaps what you are describing is not about the EFI specification iteself, but what different manufacturers add on top of it? It's in the latest UEFI spec - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Secure_boot . -- Bruce Cran fuck.. I'm out of touch. So this means I might not be able to boot freebsd at all on future ia64 boxes.. Anton ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
On 25 Oct 2012, at 09:40, Anton Shterenlikht me...@bristol.ac.uk wrote: So this means I might not be able to boot freebsd at all on future ia64 boxes.. Ignore the FUD - there will be an option to disable it in the firmware/BIOS settings. -- Bruce Cran ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:40:20 +0100 (BST), Anton Shterenlikht wrote: From br...@cran.org.uk Thu Oct 25 09:22:33 2012 On 25 Oct 2012, at 08:52, Anton Shterenlikht me...@bristol.ac.uk wrote: I'm probably missing something here. ia64 uses EFI, but there's nothing about checking for non-signed code. I can boot VMS, FreeBSD, linux, etc. And, by the way, firmware updates from EFI via e.g. USB flash drives is trivial on ia64. Perhaps what you are describing is not about the EFI specification iteself, but what different manufacturers add on top of it? It's in the latest UEFI spec - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Secure_boot . -- Bruce Cran fuck.. I'm out of touch. So this means I might not be able to boot freebsd at all on future ia64 boxes.. There probably won't be much ia64 boxes in the future. You should worry to not be able to run FreeBSD on ARM, and maybe even later on normal x86 (amd64) hardware, if specific interested parties should get their will... -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Polytropon free...@edvax.de wrote: On Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:38:48 +0100 (BST), Anton Shterenlikht wrote: Anyway, I think I've heard there are some laptops with no BIOS, is this true? Per termini technici, yes. Some systems use EFI (or UEFI) instead of a BIOS. It's comparable to a much more advanced (than BIOS) micro-OS that initializes the hardware, connectes to the Internet, tells the manufacturer what you're doing and keeps limiting you in what you are allowed to install. :-) Heh... ;-) (U)EFI is nothing new for us old farts: we've had OpenBoot[1] on Sun hardware for ages, and even though it didn't limit us w.r.t. the OS you wanted to boot (that's why you can install FreeBSD/sparc64 on used Sun machines), it had its issues too. Mainly that it needed a counter-part in hardware peripherals. E.g.: without F-Code in ROM, a PCI-based frame buffer wouldn't be usable there, because it wouldn't reply to the OpenBoot queries. The point is that firmware CAN be a mini-OS and more powerful than PC-BIOS. There's nothing wrong with that, and the flexibility of OFW/OpenBoot was for us sysadmins invaluable, esp. with diskless machines. What's wrong, is UEFI's DRM-scheme used to prevent non-signed code to be loaded... without mandating in the specs that the BIOS vendor MUST allow the device owner to add his/her own keys to it. That's the evil part of it. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware -cpghost. -- Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain
On Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:38:48 +0100 (BST), Anton Shterenlikht wrote: There is an updated BIOS version, but so far I failed to get it installed. HP only provide MS and freedos executables. I tried BartPE - doesn't work. Maybe you can utilize the approach to create the typical DOS boot diskette and access it via attached USB floppy disk drive? I tried plugging in a MS disk - doesn't work. The only think I haven't tried is getting a spare disk, installing freedos on it and then running the freedos executable from USB - what a fucking pain... The idea with a disk could work, but seems a bit over- complicated for such a simple (yes, haha) task like updating the BIOS. For proper hardware (servers) HP provide images which are executed from management console, but not for laptops. I guess the idea that one might use their laptops for anything other than MS is so wild, that it never crossed their maid. That's because it doesn't exist. :-) Anyway, I think I've heard there are some laptops with no BIOS, is this true? Per termini technici, yes. Some systems use EFI (or UEFI) instead of a BIOS. It's comparable to a much more advanced (than BIOS) micro-OS that initializes the hardware, connectes to the Internet, tells the manufacturer what you're doing and keeps limiting you in what you are allowed to install. :-) Or perhaps there are brands where BIOS reflash is not such a great pain? Yes, mainframes with loadable microprogram. :-) I remember on Compaq Armada the BIOS was stored on disk and Compaq provided a floppy image to boot from and reflash BIOS. That was easy. I remember that idea, but having to rely on a working hard disk in order to have _basic_ (that's what the 'B' in BIOS means) input and output functionality looks a bit ridiculous. Anything like this exist these days? For sure, but not very common in home consumer hardware (yet). Are there any EFI laptops? As far as I know, Apple only makes such. Newer netbooks intended to run MICROS~1 products are also known, both for i386/amd64 and ARM architecture (with the idea that on ARM, you cannot run anything else than what the hardware vendor allows, which is Windows). Any model people would recommend? IBM Thinkpad. :-) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
