N400c dead after Bios flash

Hello,

first of all, please excuse my lousy english. It's been years since I last used it for writing instead of reading.

Some days ago, my faithful colleague a N400c needed a Bios update to be able to boot from USB. So I downloaded the Winflash utility from HPs website thinking 'wow, winflash utility. Os is fresh, so why not use the easy one'.
Dumb, I know, should have listened to my gut instinct and use the DOS-utility, but well, you get lazy with all those win-utils with double backup bios and so on these days.

Ok, what happened is, the utility worked as expected, did the flashing, showed a countdown and rebooted the machine then. After that, the fan instantly kicked in and the three leds labeled with A, 1 and an arrow pointing down lit up. I thought that would be normal and went for a coffee.

10 minutes later, nothing had changed, so I tried to power down. No reaction to the power button.
Unplugged the power and pushed the power button. Machine starts but returns to the state described above.

That was the moment I started to hate myself, so I began googling, to find out I am not alone. I found this thread where the Crisis Recovery Method is mentioned and tried it. First problem is, that the bios-files from HP are 1024kb, while the needed BIOS.WPH is 512kb. But then even with all combinations of fn+b or win+b I couldnt get my N400c to make any beeps or try to access the disk drive of the docking station.

I might need to use a parallel port boot block jumper, but I have no idea how to get one, or which pins of the N400c have to be connected to simulate one.
Or maybe the Crisis Recovery is not working on N400cs at all. Or the docking-stations disk drive is not supported but an usb-drive?

I hope maybe someone can lead me into the right direction or knows if there is no way I can fix this.

Thank you in advance.
tin

 

*bump*

No specialists here?

 

Hi

Try the following:

- Take out anything thats plugged into the notebook (usb, lan, etc)

- Take out the battery pack and unplug the AC power

- Hold the power button for 30 seconds or more to clear the cmos

- Try starting up again....

 

Thank you for your reply, flipfire.
Unfortunately resetting the cmos was one of the first things I tried. I even unplugged the internal buffer battery and left the power-wires short-circuited for about 48 hours without success. (Without AC and battery pack of course)

After a lot of research I am 99% sure, that the N400c does not have a bios recovery option, neither by pressing keys while powering on, nor by using a parallel port boot block. Every documentation I found was for other Laptops with similar bioses, but all my effords failed.

If there is someone who can affirm that the N400c can not be revived after a bios corruption, then please clarify, so I can bury this thing and let it rest in peace

 

I think you may be able to try and reflash the BIOS if you use and external floppy drive. I'm not completely sure of the process but I would search online some information on how to do it.

 

I think you be better try with usb floppy too

 

Look for "crisis recovery tool", I just went through this too.

 

you could try the information below.

http://www.biosman.com/biosrecovery.html