HP BIOS Corruption (Intermittent)

[sapphirescales]

This has always bugged me, but occasionally I'll get in an HP laptop that refuses to boot intermittently with the blink code of 2 (BIOS corruption) but if you repeatedly turn it off and on again maybe 5-10 times, it turns on and boots up normally. I've never been able to "fix" one of these computers by flashing the BIOS. It always ends up needing a motherboard replacement. Has anyone else seen this? If the BIOS is truly corrupted, then why does it boot sometimes and not other times and why does updating the BIOS not fix it?

I've only seen this with HP's. Makes me think it's a known issue with them that they've just never fixed (I've seen this happen on a laptop as old as 2012/2013 all the way up to this nice 2019 one I have in my shop right now). I know all about making a flash drive and recovering the BIOS that way. That NEVER seems to work (when I am able to flash the BIOS, I do it by restarting the laptop 5-10 times and running the program in Windows to flash it). Any ideas?

 

[Sky-Knight]

I stopped recommending HP over a decade ago, they love under sizing their cooling systems and then acting shocked when things melt. Given that I live in a desert, that translates into a bucket of melted main boards.

The issue you're describing sounds like weak soldier joints somewhere, and the temperature of the circuit is sometimes making it connect. I highly doubt there is a real fix, short of replacing the defective part.

 

[Diggs]

I've sold quite a few older refurbished Elitebooks in the past and I have not seen this. They have been built like tanks and the only failures I have seen is from liquid damage (spilled glass of wine).

 

[britechguy]

@Diggs, I'm with you on this one.

Just worked on an older EliteBook for one of my clients and it is a tank. Am typing from an HP consumer grade 15 series laptop that's never given me a single day of problems, and still have my old one (but it has an A8 APU, so it's slow compared to newer hardware) plus one more that was a cast off from a client (and lived a very hard life) all of which have, in the words of the old Timex ad, taken a licking and kept on ticking.

Of course, I am not brand loyal, period. I've owned E-machines, Gateway, HP, Asus, Toshiba and Acer. They all did what I needed them to do at the time I needed them to do it, and none of them have been retired due to major failure, just typical computer obsolescence.

 

[sapphirescales]

@Diggs - I've never seen this in a business class HP, only in their consumer models. I too only recommend business class computers and have had very little problems with them. But most people don't buy business class. They buy the shiny turd on sale at Best Buy. Doesn't matter whether it's a $300 turd or a $1,500 turd...it's still a turd. It's hard to get people to understand this sometimes. "But I spent $1,000! It has to be good!"