Hi Guys,
Complete newbie here, hopefully someone will be able to help me or at least point in a right direction.
Here’s the story: said ProBook has lost sound. After a good dose of troubleshooting I put it down to hardware failure so purchased and swapped a mobo in it - all is well. Over the course of several days Installed Win10 + some end user apps, everything works fine. Few days later upon boot “ME unlock not permitted in production mode” appears on the screen followed by a shutdown. Very little info can be found to what it even means, and solutions are limited to “Send it back to HP”.
So I thought I’d try flashing the bios. Bought the CH341a programmer and tried making the copy if the bios first. In linux it reads it but with a message “Block protection cannot be disabled”. In windows it reads the chip but there’s very little in the hex value section, which makes me think it’s not being read correctly. UEFItool also throws an error, something like "not a single volume found, Image may be corrupt"
So my questions are:
1. Is this a lost case?
2. The image read with ch341a is 16MB in size but the bios downloaded from HP Has 2x8MB files. What gives?
3. My understanding is that since it’s a uefi bios some info like MAC addresses and UUID need to be added to the image, how to do it?
4. Could I simply swap the BIOS chip from the old mobo? Apart from sound it worked fine.
Ultimately if this machine cannot be recovered than it’s not the end of the world, but I believe in “use it 'till it dies” so I’d like to give its revival a fair shot, plus I’d like to learn something new at the same time.
Any input is highly appreciated.
Mads
Bios dump is attached, it compressed to 20KB so I’m almost certain there’s something wrong with it…
650g1 dump.zip (19.4 KB)
No input whatsoever? Did I post it in a wrong place?