Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

Repeating a reply to a comment here, but I think it needs to be said.<p>People need to be careful they don&#x27;t overgeneralize too much about HP. Especially if basing opinions on home&#x2F;small office product lines, which is not all HP does. I&#x27;ll fully agree that the bad rep due to home&#x2F;small office products is probably well deserved.<p>But HP has some pretty interesting and successful products such as the Life Sciences dispensers for cells and fluids (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hp.com&#x2F;us-en&#x2F;specialty-printing-solutions&#x2F;life-s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hp.com&#x2F;us-en&#x2F;specialty-printing-solutions&#x2F;life-s</a>...).<p>Then there are the industrial printing products (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hp.com&#x2F;us-en&#x2F;industrial-digital-presses.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hp.com&#x2F;us-en&#x2F;industrial-digital-presses.html</a>) which are rather mind bogglingly fast and capable. Imagine a printer printing to a paper roll 40&quot; wide at hundreds of feet per second, and the printing is paper statements to be cut and sorted for mailing.

No human on this planet has gone to that much trouble to repair an Envy before. Bravo!<p>I think we&#x27;ve all been frustrated by HP&#x2F;Dell&#x2F;Others support. This guy took it to the next level to prove <i>it&#x27;s not the freaking ram</i>.<p>Nicely done.

Report warranty fraud here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reportfraud.ftc.gov&#x2F;form&#x2F;main?TC=RightToRepair" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reportfraud.ftc.gov&#x2F;form&#x2F;main?TC=RightToRepair</a><p>more info <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gamersnexus.net&#x2F;gn-extras-news&#x2F;gamersnexus-warranty-response-kit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gamersnexus.net&#x2F;gn-extras-news&#x2F;gamersnexus-warranty-...</a>

&gt; would have been much easier if I&#x27;d had a Bus Pirate and SOP8 adapter to clip onto the IC while it was still on the motherboard. &gt;I decide to remove it from the motherboard<p>For those who want to avoid soldering(unavoidable if chip is bad), SOP8 clips are very cheap on ebay.<p>There are many alternatives to the STM32 dev board used in the article, common ones are raspberry pi&#x27;s such as the zero w(what I tend to use, requires some config changes), but also SPI to USB adapters for PC. Always read the flash several times to increase the likelihood you got an error free read, and also read it after writing as well.<p>Having a working setup able to read and write spi flash is very inexpensive and a handy emergency skill to have.

Related context:<p><i>HP bricks customers laptops with faulty automatic BIOS upgrade</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40601711">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40601711</a>

Long time ago, I had a similar - but worse - experience with Sony, with a Vaio laptop.<p>Ultra-high end laptop, and I had also paid for and fitted an Intel X25-E, the very first and single-cell ultra high performance SSD. Laptop was 2k euro, drive was another 700 euro.<p>After a year or two, the fan begins to run loud - that&#x27;s fine, normal event.<p>Laptop is sent back under warranty for fan replacement.<p>Laptop returns <i>with a new motherboard</i> (and as such, the SIM I left in the motherboard was missing).<p>Windows does NOT like having the motherboard changed underneath it, and was royally confused on boot, and no longer worked correctly.<p>I explain this to Support, and that it takes a month for a fresh install of Windows to be fully up to speed.<p>Laptop is sent back again.<p>Support then sends me an invoice : their solution to having fucked up Windows is to <i>remove my 700 euro X25-E drive</i> and charge me 400 euro to install a new standard Sony spinning-platter drive with a fresh install of Windows on it.<p>I gave up with Sony, got my laptop back, reinstalled Windows, and never had anything to do with them again.

Technically awesome, but policy-wise, sic Tech Jesus from Gamers Nexus (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7pMrssIrKcY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7pMrssIrKcY</a>) and&#x2F;or Louis Rossmann on HP!

HP is a terrible company and should be boycotted. I&#x27;ve had problems with their whole range from printers to laptops. Lenovo is a superior alternative.

So sad.<p>I still have my (working) HP 11C and HP 15C calculators, from the early 1980&#x27;s.<p>But HP was still a decent company, back then.

When I was a kid HP products were well-supported and famed for their durability. My dad still uses the HP scientific calculator his father bought in the &#x27;70s and my uncle has an old PC hooked up to a &#x27;90s LaserJet printer that works perfectly well. Retired engineers I&#x27;ve talked to gush about working there in the HP Way days, they were respected and got to create fantastic products that their customers loved.<p>Now &quot;HP&quot; is a curse word to anyone in tech. It&#x27;s a damn shame.

I’ve never had much success once the bricking gets to this point. Nice to see such a detailed write up, though this is probably the exception that proves the rule.

&gt; Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act it is illegal for HP to renege on their warranty unless the reason for warranty work is demonstrably due to the consumer&#x27;s changes.<p>Aside from what would be morally right to do I doubt HP is legally compelled to repair it.<p>I&#x27;m guessing that since this was handled under &quot;extended warranty&quot; the rules of your &quot;minimum legal warranty&quot; don&#x27;t apply since those have already expired. So the rules of the agreement of the &quot;extended warranty&quot; apply. Which as far as I know is basically just a sort of insurance product with it&#x27;s own agreement. Guess it&#x27;s a pretty safe bet the terms contain a clause about not allowing modifications to the product in any form.

I got a HP Spectre x360 around 2018 and it was the worst laptop I ever owned. Ever since that experience I steer clear of HP stuff.

The old school cooked BIOS method (or flash programming of anything if it was the same chip) was to boot a similar and good board to its bios updater, hot swap the bad chip and the good chip, and then execute the updater to write on the bad chip.<p>But life was easier when this stuff was socketed.

It&#x27;s too bad the author didn&#x27;t think to restore the factory RAM before shipping it. My unrelenting cynicism always makes me very careful to hide any evidence of tinkering on the rare occasions when I need to send a tech product off for warranty repairs.

Wouldn&#x27;t they have grounds to sue for damage for his labor cost now? That could be a big amount, given how much time they spent fixing this laptop.<p>Isn&#x27;t there ground for fraud too, given how support pretended the problem was something totally unrelated?

That&#x27;s very surprising that the image from the firmware update alone is sufficient to boot the machine. On the overwhelming majority of laptops, the update capsules don&#x27;t contain the NVRAM sections (so no set or default values for any settings) and typically this is enough to prevent the firmware from booting the machine.<p>It&#x27;s also interesting&#x2F;impressive how much work the author went through to reinvent the wheel with his own custom microcontroller setup for reading and flashing the EEPROM when there are so many cheap off the shelf solutions available (that can read and program hundreds of times faster than it sounds like his did).

For a long time HP bought their motherboards as &#x27;a spot-buy on the open market&#x27;. Meaning, whatever overseas supplier promised the cheapest price for a given spec.<p>That must have been part of the erosion of the &#x27;HPWay&#x27;?

A fallback BIOS should be standard by now<p>Didn&#x27;t Gigabyte put that onto their mainboards

I think the main lesson is that if you are going to send something for warranty, better to send it as original as possible, otherwise they are going to claim that your modification was the cause of the issue.

This is a very cool story. I&#x27;ve messed around with SPI flash stuff both using Pomona clips and also individual per pin clips: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jgc.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;an-unexpected-journey-making-yogasleep.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jgc.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;an-unexpected-journey-making-yo...</a>

Great read. Hopefully others find this useful if they are in a similar situation. HP support is appalling.

Incredible work. Dual BIOS setups seem like they require very little more PCB space and will cut down on returns. I wonder why manufacturers don&#x27;t do this. Perhaps the numbers just don&#x27;t pencil out and it&#x27;s better to handle the risk of failure.

HP is an all-round abomination of a company.

I&#x27;m continually amazed by the (lack of) quality of their laptops and the scenario described really reinforced my opinion of HP.<p>At work, I&#x27;ve used a ProBook, a ZBook, and two EliteBooks, all of which had major issues. Sleep mode never worked on any of them (immediately turning back on again with <i>powercfg &#x2F;lastwake</i> showing no reason), and my current EliteBook frequently shuts off without warning and then won&#x27;t turn on for five minutes. The ProBook and one EliteBook failed randomly and needed to be replaced.<p>The ZBook&#x27;s workstation CPU overheated even at light usage, making it unbearably slow. Despite IT saying nothing could (and should) be done, I disassembled it and found it was missing thermal paste, or what little there was had hardened into a brittle, useless mess. Reapplying thermal paste about tripled the Cinebench score.<p>Given all this ridiculousness, I can&#x27;t imagine how much worse their consumer laptops must be. It&#x27;s baffling how anyone but the most naive non-tech people still buys from them.

HP make nice monitors and that&#x27;s about it, every other product of theirs is utter trash now - I advise everybody I know to steer clear of any of their stuff. They&#x27;re on my shit-company list, right at the top with GoDaddy.

Impressive that he had the tools to flash the chip but it’s absolutely ridiculous that HP and all companies in general can get away with this sort of nonsense, voiding the warranty should be an easy small claims court appeal.

Other lessons one can take from this:<p>* Never buy an HP.<p>* For personal use, one should also treat computers as cattle, not pets. Always automatically backup to at least 2 different locations.