I've HP compaq 6715s laptop. It's all right with 10-current. I've got wireless and at one point I even managed to get flash working.
My problem is with BIOS. Apparently it's wrong and John Baldwin provided me with a pci.c patch to get it to boot.
There is an updated BIOS version, but so far I failed to get it installed. HP only provide MS and freedos executables. I tried BartPE - doesn't work. I tried plugging in a MS disk - doesn't work. The only think I haven't tried is getting a spare disk, installing freedos on it and then running the freedos executable from USB - what a fucking pain...
For proper hardware (servers) HP provide images which are executed from management console, but not for laptops. I guess the idea that one might use their laptops for anything other than MS is so wild, that it never crossed their maid.
Anyway, I think I've heard there are some laptops with no BIOS, is this true? Or perhaps there are brands where BIOS reflash is not such a great pain? I remember on Compaq Armada the BIOS was stored on disk and Compaq provided a floppy image to boot from and reflash BIOS. That was easy. Anything like this exist these days? Are there any EFI laptops? Any model people would recommend?
Thanks
Anton
Another approach is to use an external SPI programmer: http://flashrom.org/Supported_programmers The 'downside' of this is that you need to take your laptop apart.
ODM schematics of your laptop are found here: http://notebookschematic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/6515b_6715s.png Downloads for BIOS updates: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&a... and ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp55501-56000/sp55556.exe
My guess (I am not a HP service technician) is that you need ROM.CAB/Rom.bin from sp55556.exe - you can use 7zip to extract Rom.bin