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HP bricks ProBook laptops with bad BIOS delivered via automatic updates — many users face black screen after Windows pushes new firmware (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

148 comments fedilink hide all child comments

On May 26, a user on HP's support forums reported that a forced, automatic BIOS update had bricked their HP ProBook 455 G7 into an unusable state. Subsequently, other users have joined the thread to sound off about experiencing the same issue.

This common knowledge regarding BIOS software would, then, seem to make automatic, forced BIOS updates a real issue, even if it weren't breaking anything. Allowing the user to manually install and prepare their systems for a BIOS update is key to preventing issues like this.

At the time of writing, HP has made no official comment on the matter — and since this battery update was forced on laptops originally released in 2020, this issue has also bricked hardware outside of the warranty window, when previously users could simply send in the laptop for a free repair.

Overall, this isn't a very good look for HP, particularly its BIOS update practices. The fragility of BIOS software should have tipped off the powers at be at HP about the lack of foresight in this release model, and now we're seeing it in full force with forced, bugged BIOS updates that kill laptops.

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[–] fury 58 points 5 months ago (3 children)

How do these things not have unbrickable A/B firmware partitions by now? Even I have that on a $2 microcontroller. Self-test doesn't pass after an update? Instant automatic rollback to the previous working partition.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It's pretty ridiculous not to have a way of recovering from a failed update.

On my desktop, I just have to plug a flash drive with the BIOS image into a specific USB port and press a button on the motherboard. It doesn't matter if the BIOS is broken and it doesn't even require a CPU or RAM to be installed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

HP notebooks can do that too though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Gigabyte?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

do they even use 'dualbios' anymore? all i've seen lately is 'q flash' (for updating bios without a cpu or video present) on their boards.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

It's an Asrock board.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Hate to be that guy, but I bet someone somewhere did the math of how much extra profit they can get from people having their device bricked and just getting a new one vs how many of them actually do the warranty claim

[–] dorumon 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

My motherboard legit does this. Though it's probably more so it's an industrial one with like 8 SATA ports than anything else.

[–] Aux 2 points 5 months ago

Plenty of motherboards do that and plenty of laptops. It's just HP sucks big time, not only their printers. Fuck HP.