Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop | Hacker News Reader

Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

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Repeating a reply to a comment here, but I think it needs to be said.

People need to be careful they don't overgeneralize too much about HP. Especially if basing opinions on home/small office product lines, which is not all HP does. I'll fully agree that the bad rep due to home/small office products is probably well deserved.

But HP has some pretty interesting and successful products such as the Life Sciences dispensers for cells and fluids (see https://www.hp.com/us-en/specialty-printing-solutions/life-s...).

Then there are the industrial printing products (https://www.hp.com/us-en/industrial-digital-presses.html) which are rather mind bogglingly fast and capable. Imagine a printer printing to a paper roll 40" wide at hundreds of feet per second, and the printing is paper statements to be cut and sorted for mailing.

That people will generalize is something that HP should consider when they "comingle" their various divisions.

Eh, it's not just home/small office. Their proliant servers took a pretty big nosedive around Gen 9 or so.

I'm sure they still have some nice specialized industrial equipment, but their general purpose computers, even on the high end, just aren't what they used to be

Planned obsolescence, Lack of innovation, High cost of consumables, Inadequate software support, Inconsistent product quality, Poor customer service.. not sure why you feel the need to defend them. They're prolly the one of the worst companies alive..

This commenter is almost certainly a paid guerilla marketing shill for HP. The fact they have the top comment just takes the cake.

No human on this planet has gone to that much trouble to repair an Envy before. Bravo!

I think we've all been frustrated by HP/Dell/Others support. This guy took it to the next level to prove it's not the freaking ram.

Nicely done.

Report warranty fraud here https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/form/main?TC=RightToRepair

more info https://gamersnexus.net/gn-extras-news/gamersnexus-warranty-...

Thank you!

> would have been much easier if I'd had a Bus Pirate and SOP8 adapter to clip onto the IC while it was still on the motherboard. >I decide to remove it from the motherboard

For those who want to avoid soldering(unavoidable if chip is bad), SOP8 clips are very cheap on ebay.

There are many alternatives to the STM32 dev board used in the article, common ones are raspberry pi'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.

Having a working setup able to read and write spi flash is very inexpensive and a handy emergency skill to have.

I used one of those clips and a raspberry pi to reflash an HP all-in-one that was bricked. I was super proud of it, but then it was destroyed in shipping on its way to the customer.

I miss rs232 and parallel ports that made stuff like this trivially easy with just diodes and resistors.

Related context:

HP bricks customers laptops with faulty automatic BIOS upgrade

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601711

Long time ago, I had a similar - but worse - experience with Sony, with a Vaio laptop.

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.

After a year or two, the fan begins to run loud - that's fine, normal event.

Laptop is sent back under warranty for fan replacement.

Laptop returns with a new motherboard (and as such, the SIM I left in the motherboard was missing).

Windows does NOT like having the motherboard changed underneath it, and was royally confused on boot, and no longer worked correctly.

I explain this to Support, and that it takes a month for a fresh install of Windows to be fully up to speed.

Laptop is sent back again.

Support then sends me an invoice : their solution to having fucked up Windows is to remove my 700 euro X25-E drive and charge me 400 euro to install a new standard Sony spinning-platter drive with a fresh install of Windows on it.

I gave up with Sony, got my laptop back, reinstalled Windows, and never had anything to do with them again.

I'm truing to understand here what you were expecting the outcome to be? Your old motherboard back, but fixed?

I think they just wanted the fan replaced....

Technically awesome, but policy-wise, sic Tech Jesus from Gamers Nexus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pMrssIrKcY) and/or Louis Rossmann on HP!

Link needs a (2021) I think. Repository says 3 years ago. However, they'd probably still be interested as a pattern of evidence thing.

I should have included the year, apologies.

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

So sad.

I still have my (working) HP 11C and HP 15C calculators, from the early 1980's.

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 '70s and my uncle has an old PC hooked up to a '90s LaserJet printer that works perfectly well. Retired engineers I'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.

Now "HP" is a curse word to anyone in tech. It's a damn shame.

I feel like a lot of companies went that way. I have one of those HP calculators, and it was fantastic.

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.

> 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's changes.

Aside from what would be morally right to do I doubt HP is legally compelled to repair it.

I'm guessing that since this was handled under "extended warranty" the rules of your "minimum legal warranty" don't apply since those have already expired. So the rules of the agreement of the "extended warranty" apply. Which as far as I know is basically just a sort of insurance product with it's own agreement. Guess it's a pretty safe bet the terms contain a clause about not allowing modifications to the product in any form.

A major vendor did something similar to us about a decade ago. Brand new notebooks bricked after the vendor's tech support directed us to install a "required" system update. Vendor claimed that they we're not liable for the damage and pointed to their End User Agreement and Warranty policy. Turns out they had clauses that stated that the vendor was not responsible for damage to devices caused by firmware or BIOS updates. We would later learn that the required system update included a BIOS update responsible for the damage. Its been over a decade since we've even considered a purchase from them again.

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.

But life was easier when this stuff was socketed.

It's too bad the author didn'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.

The laptop was purchased with upgraded RAM, so there wasn't any OEM sticks to swap in. That is a good idea if possible though.

Wouldn'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.

Isn't there ground for fraud too, given how support pretended the problem was something totally unrelated?

That'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'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.

It's also interesting/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).

The desoldering did it for me but good for him if it works in the end. It could be done by way less technical people with the proper (cheap) tools though. The article is a bit of a double edged sword because of it.

I agree. The situation was me trying to use materials on-hand, but it makes the writeup less useful.

For a long time HP bought their motherboards as 'a spot-buy on the open market'. Meaning, whatever overseas supplier promised the cheapest price for a given spec.

That must have been part of the erosion of the 'HPWay'?

A fallback BIOS should be standard by now

Didn't Gigabyte put that onto their mainboards

Yes, around 2009: https://www.techpowerup.com/96967/dualbios-becomes-standard-...

Gigabyte has had dual bios motherboards since 1999, but made it standard for all their motherboards in 2009.

https://www.gigabyte.com/Press/News/795

As I recall, they initially introduced this feature due to a virus around the time which would intentionally corrupt BIOSes.

The CIH virus? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIH_(computer_virus)

And any server has them.

And for all the crap Lenovo laptops are these days; they also have backup BIOS.

Funnily enough, most BIOS updates end with a "self-healing backup progressing" screen nowadays - which makes me wonder: do they overwrite the backup and abuse that mechanism to update the primary bios?

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.

Yep. It’s illegal but they’ll keep doing it as long as people don’t take them to court.

HP is falling behind the state of the art, though. I hear Samsung would have just stolen the thing.

That would save on shipping.

That, or they won't notice at all, and when a repair calls for replacing the logic board, say, they'll replace it with one pre-populated with whatever components match the BOM on file for your system, sending the original board populated with your aftermarket components for refurbishing and/or recycling without a second thought.

This is a very cool story. I've messed around with SPI flash stuff both using Pomona clips and also individual per pin clips: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/05/an-unexpected-journey-making-yo...

Thanks for sharing. I love how detailed that writeup is. And you used the tools that I wasn't smart enough to employ for mine.

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't do this. Perhaps the numbers just don't pencil out and it's better to handle the risk of failure.

HP is an all-round abomination of a company.

I'm continually amazed by the (lack of) quality of their laptops and the scenario described really reinforced my opinion of HP.

At work, I'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 powercfg /lastwake showing no reason), and my current EliteBook frequently shuts off without warning and then won't turn on for five minutes. The ProBook and one EliteBook failed randomly and needed to be replaced.

The ZBook'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.

Given all this ridiculousness, I can't imagine how much worse their consumer laptops must be. It's baffling how anyone but the most naive non-tech people still buys from them.

My manager's company-issued HP EliteBook is actually the third device he's had during the last three years, as the previous units failed without warning. Nowadays if I don't see him on the standup I assume it's this problem again.

Kind of reminds me of the darkest days of MBPs and their failing keyboards.

My work laptop is doing ok so far with only minor annoyances like needing to reconnect peripherals after waking up the device, but that's it.

Meanwhile I cooked the screen in my Asus personal machine because it assumed that sleep = 100% CPU. Thermal paste was of course cooked as well, so I had to replace it.

All in all I'm glad that Framework expanded into my country recently. It's expensive for what it offers, but half the reason I'll be ordering one is spite.

HP make nice monitors and that'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're on my shit-company list, right at the top with GoDaddy.

It’s a shame, their small form-factor business notebooks were once really good. Swappable batteries, worked well with Linux (apart from the touchpad drivers that were just bad for all brands back then).

Their servers always seemed pretty nice back in the day, though I don't have any experience since the HPE spin-off.

HPE stuff is fine imo, networking stuff is decent and the servers still have some quirks from the HP days but other than that are great.

When I was a tech I hated their servers so much. It was super easy to damage them when taking them apart, and their raid controllers would cause dban to crash. I did liked the Z400 workstation, though, since it could secure erase drives without having to go to sleep to unfreeze the drives.

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.

I wonder if there are people who disagree with you, because I can't think of why someone would've flagged your comment.

Other lessons one can take from this:

* Never buy an HP.

* For personal use, one should also treat computers as cattle, not pets. Always automatically backup to at least 2 different locations.

Careful you don't overgeneralize too much. You're probably basing this on home/small office product lines, which is not all HP does.

HP has some pretty interesting and successful products such as the Life Sciences dispensers for cells and fluids (see https://www.hp.com/us-en/specialty-printing-solutions/life-s...).

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