On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 11:42:13AM +1000, John Clarke wrote:
> Unfortunately HP only provide updates as a package with a Windows (not
> DOS) program called WinFlash.
Thanks to all who replied with suggestions on how to do the upgrade
without reinstalling Windows. I did finally manage to do the upgrade,
but it took a few attempts before I got it to work:
- replacing my hard disc with another containing Windows didn't
work. The only disc I could get hold of was from a Dell laptop,
and that wouldn't boot (apparently because Dell do something
weird in their boot loader).
- building the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows on a Windows PC at work
failed build because the machine I was using had a different
version of Cygwin (cygwin1.dll) installed to that used by the
tools in the UBCD4Win package, which meant that the UBCD4Win
tools wouldn't run, and neither would any Cygwin programs on the
PC until I rebooted it.
- building the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows on a new (Dell) latop
with Vista and no Cygwin worked, but the BIOS upgrade program
wouldn't run because it's hard-coded to use C:, and only B: (RAM
disc) and X: (CD) were available. Mounting a network drive onto
C: was my first thought for a workaround but that wasn't
possible because I couldn't get networking to start.
- unpacking the BIOS program under Wine and copying to a USB flash
drive didn't work either because it didn't accept the hotplugged
flash drive.
- rebooting from the Windows CD with the flash drive plugged in
worked, and finally something went right: the flash drive
appeared as C:. I ran the program, upgraded the BIOS, and it
worked. It even fixed the corrupted model and serial numbers
:-)
Cheers,
John
--
Ah, the advantage of M$ software. As the number of errors in the
software grows towards infinity, the probability that a specific error
is non-trivial approaches 0. Which means all M$ related problems are
trivial and easily solved by Googling. -- Toni Lassila
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