I have an HP Envy 15t-ae100, it was released in late 2015 I believe. HP supposedly stopped putting wireless whitelists on their laptops in 2014-2015 but I guess I just got unlucky because my BIOS has one.
I’m pretty sure I found how to patch out the whitelist entirely, but even if that doesn’t work I can just go the easy route and replace a supported vendor/device id with the one I’m trying to install. My current problem is getting the laptop to boot at all once any modified firmware is flashed.
After making any modification to the bios and then flashing it (programming the chip directly), the laptop refuses to boot it and starts restoring the old BIOS from the saved copy on the EFI partition. If this is missing then it just halts the system and flashes the caps lock light.
I’m fairly certain this is a signature check failing and not UEFITool somehow corrupting the firmware because I tried replacing/rebuilding the module without any modifications and it boots perfectly. I’ve also verified that Intel Boot Guard is not configured on this machine so the check has to be in the bios somewhere. I saw CodeRush’s posts (https:// habr.com/en/post/249655/ and https:// habr.com/en/post/249939/) talking about 2 types of tamper protection on HP BIOSes, but my firmware has neither of these and I couldn’t find anything similar following the same rough process. I haven’t found any other reports of the protection present on this laptop, and I’ve spent hours aimlessly looking through the image with no success.
I’ve uploaded my F.52 bios dump (necd2ORIG.bin) as well as a dump I found online of the original 2015 F.35 firmware (080E9-old.bin) if anyone wants to take a look. The old one seems to have the same exact system in place so this protection has existed for at least 5 years now.
If anyone has any ideas or suggestions please post them, thanks.
Uploads: https:// drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rShGE1pGHfPmJH4hc3NiZhXU3V0cExun?usp=sharing