TL;DR: I dumped the BIOS recovery stick's contents here: https://exitguy.nl/downloads/ProBook430G2-BIOS-USB.bin.gz
WARNING! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!! FOR HP PROBOOK 430 G2 ONLY!!
Recently I got into posession of an HP ProBook 430 G2 laptop. The unit belonged to my mother and was already running EndeavourOS, but she hadn't updated the thing in quite a while. So I connected it to the internet and did just that! Rebooted the laptop and... it was dead.
A reboot killing a laptop?? I'm pretty sure the EndeavourOS updates haven't done anything to the thing's BIOS. What's happening!? The caps-lock key was blinking continuously, and after some time the fan started ramping up, but those were the only signs of life. Disconnecting the battery did not fix it. Holding win+b or win+v as found online did nothing either.
The only other mention of this issue I could find was this post on the HP supportforums, where litteraly no-one ansered but the OP who fixed the issue with a BIOS recovery USB. The file linked on that page threw me a 404 though, but luckily when I selected Windows on the unit's support page I could just download a BIOS update tool... for Windows...
That's right! Windows-only! A tool to create a USB drive... why? Why not just provide an image? *sigh*
I tried to follow this blogpost to create the stick by extracting the files with Wine, but it didn't work in my case.
When I ran the thing from Windows 11, I could create a stick without any issues. Plugged it into the laptop. Turned it on and... a few seconds later I saw a BIOS update on screen! Victory!!
To save myself (and hopefully others) some headeaches the next time this happens, I dumped the contents of the stick to an image one can write to a stick using dd, or Gnone-disks, or whatever tool you like most. ;)
I used the smallest USB-stick I own to create it, which was 512MB in size, so any drive you've got with that size or more should work just fine. The image is gzipped to just 5.2MB, which is about the size of the drive's contents. Find the link in the TL;DR above!
For whomever's interested, this is what the drive's file structure looks like:
.
├── Hewlett-Packard
│ ├── BIOS
│ │ ├── Current
│ │ │ └── M74_0154.bin
│ │ ├── New
│ │ └── Previous
│ └── BiosUpdate
│ ├── CryptRSA32.efi
│ ├── CryptRSA.efi
│ ├── HpBiosMgmt32.efi
│ ├── HpBiosMgmt32.s09
│ ├── HpBiosMgmt32.s12
│ ├── HpBiosMgmt32.s14
│ ├── HpBiosMgmt.efi
│ ├── HpBiosMgmt.s09
│ ├── HpBiosMgmt.s12
│ ├── HpBiosMgmt.s14
│ ├── HpBiosUpdate32.efi
│ ├── HpBiosUpdate32.s09
│ ├── HpBiosUpdate32.s12
│ ├── HpBiosUpdate32.s14
│ ├── HpBiosUpdate32.sig
│ ├── HpBiosUpdate.efi
│ ├── HpBiosUpdate.s09
│ ├── HpBiosUpdate.s12
│ ├── HpBiosUpdate.s14
│ └── HpBiosUpdate.sig
└── System Volume Information
└── WPSettings.dat
8 directories, 22 files
That's all I have for you today! Thank you and good night!