> Are you sure there is no iso image with self boot and update, ready to > be burned on a cdrom? I don't know for sure, but I think last time I > was using that. I don't own HP gear, but IBM/Lenovo has this kind of > iso image and I've used it a lot.
Not as far as I can tell, and the guy at HP support I've been chatting with maintains that Vista is the only way to do it. I remember Vista beta came on DVD it was so big. I used Rufus (Windows freeware) to load my XP ISO onto an SD card and boot from it to install XP on a hard drive, then did the BIOS update from that. Dell would have a more practical solution too. I think they had self-extracting files that wrote an image onto a boot floppy last time I needed to use one about 2009. Being tied to Vista? Yuck. -- Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX
