Vista - BIOS update problem

Hello all. I'm having a serious problem and hope someone can help.
Have a one week old system. Have been tweaking it all week, a bit at a time, in hopes of getting it to run more smoothly.

HP a6750f, came loaded with WinVista Home Premium 64-bit. 8GB RAM, etc., it is fast but "hangs" a lot. I had just about gotten through the Tutorials - Vista Forums with only minimal success as of yesterday. Last issue.... to check the BIOS. I checked the BIOS, although forgot to write down what is WAS. The HP website listed a new BIOS for this unit as of 26-Jan-09 so I downloaded it. It is/was MS7548.

Before doing anything else I made a new restore point, not that it helps me now.
The BIOS update was an .exe file which had to be clicked on from within Windows, which I did. The system rebooted and came up with a screen that noted "scanning drives". Figured it was a good time to walk away. Twelve hours later, same screen. Tried rebooting a variety of ways with no success. I have a boot repair disk (via neosmart.net) and it doesn't help because the system doesn't get that far.

Here's what it does do:
Reboots; the blue HP screen comes up with four options F10, F9, F11, and esc. Have tried them all. All momentarily display a screen that lists the L2, L3 cache sizes, and the drives. (All appear to be there). There is one error message printed but no repair options.
" Default BIOS settings have been loaded due to BIOS update or checksum error." ; then the next screen comes up with this.... and here it stays ....

RAID Option ROM Version 3.0.1545.47
(c) 2008 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., all rights reserved
Scanning drives

I did try pressing F4 during the boot and it does the same thing. F10 takes me straight to the stalled out screen.

The HP model is a6750f; motherboard HP P/N 497257-001, MS 7548B0811324164


I went into an online chat session with HP today and nothing recommended helped. We ended the session with them telling me to reboot and press F11 for system restore. That was the last resort so I had not done it yet. It doesn't work either! I get the same dang screen saying it is scanning the drives. Funny thing is, that as far as I know, I do not have a RAID configuration.

Grasping at straws, I've popped the CMOS battery out and rebooted - no help.
I do not know how to determine whether my motherboard has flash protection enabled - but wouldn't the HP instructions have included a message about it if it was an issue?


Help! How do I recover from this?


Thanks

Hello heiyah,

I too experienced the same problem with an HP, probably with the exact same update.

Model #: M9500f
Motherboard: MS-7548
OS: Vista 64-bit

updates located at: Select software and drivers*

Actual bios update that clobbered my bios : ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/softwar...-1/sp41004.exe

I tried various ways to reset the bios back to default settings, but to no avail.

I chatted online with HP, and they let me know that I should never do bios updates unless a machine is having major problems (basically saying I caused my own problem), and we (HP and me) were not able to resolve my problem over the phone. I routinely do many, many bios updates with Dells on campus, and have never had a problem. When doing a software upgrade, it is common practice to do firmware and bios updates to hardware. I won't do that in the future with HP drivers, based on my online chat.

In the end, since the machine is under warranty, and HP is going to pick the machine up and send it to a service center to repair it. Contact HP and let them know about the problem and that others have had this same issue.

I have attached screen prints of my issue.

Good Luck!

If only I had read this thread first!

I also did the 5.08 update on my m9500f... and at this moment they're creating the work order to deal with the replacement mess. Argh!