How to flash your BIOS on a HP Laptop

Having a HP Laptop for a while now, I was confronted with the challenge of updating its BIOS without having a Windows OS at hand. Searching through WWW didn't bring satisfying results at all. There was not a single howto that helped me to sucessfully updating my Laptop's BIOS.
What I found instead was a Website from HP that provides tools for Linux to flash the BIOS of your HP Laptop.
Unfortunately, HP only provides the BIOS file inside of a Windows .exe file - at least fo my Laptop model. So in order to get the real BIOS binary, you first need to extract that binary out of the .exe file. I found the 7z tool from p7zip to be of good help here.

If you happen to be using Gentoo, you are lucky because you can simply use the Gentoo packages I created to install the HP tools that are required for flashing the BIOS. Simply add my overlay and run the following:
emerge -anv app-arch/p7zip sys-apps/hp-flash

Non-Gentoo Linux users need to install the tools by themselves. This is explained quite thoroughly on the HP Website I linked to above so I won't go into details about this here.

Once you have downloaded the correct firmware .exe file from HP, you need to extract the .bin firmware image file:
mkdir hp_bios
cd hp_bios
7z e /path/to/the/downloaded/hp_firmware.exe

Now you should have the firmware image binary file. For my laptop its name is something like VXX_XXXXXXXX.bin where X needs to be replaced with digits.
Next step is to load the hpuefi module which is required to flash the BIOS to HP's UEFI system:
modprobe hpuefi

Create the device node that is needed to communicate with hpuefi module. When using my Gentoo packages, you can find the script that creates the node in /opt/hp/hp-flash:
bash /opt/hp/hp-flash/mkdevhpuefi

Now you can finally flash your BIOS. Keep in mind, when you have locked your BIOS with a password, you need to give that password to hp-flash as well. If you haven't set a password in your BIOS, simply omit the -p option:
/opt/hp/hp-flash/bin/hp-flash -p "yoursupersecretBIOSpassword" VXX_XXXXXXXX.bin

Do NOT turn off your laptop until the flashing procedure has finished. Once the flash process has sucessfully finished, reboot your device. And don't be surprised if your laptop turns off even though you wanted it to reboot. It seems like HP devices prefer to shut off once they got a new BIOS image flashed. Just switch the device back on and let it apply the freshly flashed BIOS image.

Example about the usual Gentoo way of treating fellow developers (not to mention users)

So I cannot emphasize this often enough but guys, spare yourself a lot of stress and troube by not becoming a Gentoo developer or try to mess with them (even with valid bug reports).

One recent example can be seen in Gentoo bug #891179 where a simple request of making a questionable information about dependency calculation time in portage optional revealed once again what kind of people can be found in Gentoo nowadays.

Arrogance at its best.

Well done fellas!

Keep in mind: These two guys are just among the worst examples.

There is a simple feedback like "Hey I don't like it, can we make it different". There's even a provided solution. HOW it could be improved. And all which comes back is: "How dare you to waste our time!!" - What a wonderful work environment you have here... I bet there are dozends of potential devs waiting in line to help out with Gentoo development... not.

For those which are still interested why people leaving, here you can get a short glimpse on the hostile work environment a few people create for everyone.

By the way: Don't be surprised when the bug "unexpectedly" disappears now that it's subject of this blog. Altering facts is common practise in Gentoo nowadays just like spying on emails (am I right, Sam? --> pts/27 ;-) ).



Let's see how many people are getting triggered this time.


And that's how Gentoo tries to hide the truth...

It's one thing being accused for slandering. It's another thing being publically called an asshole. So here's another great stunt from Gentoo. First read this PR:

Reinstate poly-c overlay #532

And now have a look for what I was banned in their GitHub organization:

Truth about mgorny nobody wants to see

And IMHO there's nothing more to add here.

How to regain my Gentoo overlay

Like I've blogged recently, Gentoo has removed my overlay from their list based on completely false assertions. That's not so much of a problem for me as I know how to get my overlay into Gentoo systems but other users of that overlay might have more difficulties to keep the overlay. As a result I've uploaded a config file for those users so they can simply drop that file into /etc/portage/repos.conf/ directory and run
CODE:
emaint sync -r poly-c
in order to re-gain access to my overlay. I hope that helps those users that got "punished" by this extremely strange move Gentoo did there.

Please don't send mails to my @gentoo.org address anymore

This morning my E-Mail account at Gentoo was suspended.

Now it seems to be back and mails are being forwarded to my private E-Mail account. Please don't send any more E-Mails to my @gentoo.org address but instead replace the host part of my address with @gmx.de. I do not really want having Gentoo jerks reading private mails.

If you nevertheless want to send an E-Mail to my @gentoo.org address, please encrypt the mail with my public GPG key.