I have an HP Pavilion DV2700 laptop with an old BIOS version I'd like to update. HP's official solution is to run something under the dinosaur Windows Vista, which I was glad to wash my hands of about 7 years ago.
I opened up HP's exe file (rename to a zip and unzip), inside is a 1 meg file 30cdf2d.wph which I think is the payload. It's a Phoenix BIOS so it's set up to use Phoenix's WinPhlash utility. I have no operating system at all on the machine at present, it has no floppy drive, doesn't boot from the CD/DVD. I can boot from USB or the hard drive only. I can put in an old hard drive from another laptop and boot it into OpenBSD. Not booting from the CD is what I'm trying to fix, a guy at HP support seems to think flashing the BIOS may help. It's possible there are remnants of Windows "Secure Boot" around from somebody trying to load Windows 7+ although since I can boot from USB (a gparted ISO written to an SD card plugged into a USB reader) I doubt it. On the Arch Linux page at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Flashing_BIOS_from_Linux there's mention of a couple programs that might work: BiosDisk and Flashrom. Anybody use either of those under OpenBSD? I haven't tried chasing down the source and trying to build them, I was a little surprised they aren't in sysutils. I don't see anything in there for flashing, just looking in pbrowser. -- Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX
