frustrating hp bios downgrade

It all starts when my motherboard broke. It had a f16 bios. When i got back a new one from hp, it had the f25 bios in it. It still does, and i don't like it at all, becaise the temperatures are very high with this bios version. I bought a notebook cooler, but they remain exactly the same! I tried to go back to f16 or even to switch to f27, but the win XP say that i don't have the administrative privilege(which is wrong).
I talked to a hp technician and she told me that this can be done only with the pre-intalled OS(Vista, i have formated that partition). Although it seems weird to me, i tried to do the bios update through a vista installation on a virtual pc. It was a long shot, and it didn't work because it said that the bios update doesn't match with the motherboard or something(also wrong).
So what should i do, use the recovery dvd(or partition) and mess with my whole arrangement of partitions(i would not like that to happen) and hope that the update can be done with Vista installed as it was in the beginning? Any suggestions?

 

Well, first I can explain the reason the VirtualPC wouldn't install the BIOS. Namely because the VirtualPC is using imaginary motherboard specifications of the virtual machine and the BIOS you'd be upgrading even if you could get it to work would be the virtual one, not the real one.

How was the BIOS update provided to you? Is it a Windows-only executable? Have you tried rebooting into Safe Mode and logging in as Administrator to try to overcome the privilege issue? If the BIOS comes as a DOS executable as well, you could try getting an external floppy, put it on a floppy disk, and boot directly to it. If they gave it to you as a bootable ISO, you could make a CD of it and boot from that as well. Normally it should not be necessary to tamper with your partitions, reinstall your OS, or recover to the original install just to change your BIOS version. Unless it has something to do with some wacky physical protection of the BIOS, you should be able to downgrade it regardless of your OS. Requiring people to have Vista installed to do a BIOS downgrade doesn't make much sense, but I've seen stranger things.

So, the short of it would be try from Safe Mode first as the Administrator. If that fails, see if there is a DOS version of the installer that can be put on a floppy or if there is an ISO of the BIOS that you can burn a bootable CD from. With that, you should be able to upgrade without needing to reinstall or tinker with things far beyond what is necessary to change something so simple.

 

Thank you very much for your explicit answer.
The bios update comes in a windows executable(downloadable from the official site, either vista or xp, or 2000...). I haven't found any floppy or iso editions.
I tried what you you told me, logged in, in safe mode as admin, and run the exe. The same happened! It says i must have administrator privilege in order to change the bios! But i do have it !!!
AAaaaaarg!

 

It's ok i did it! This exe extracts a folder in c:/ which contains the bios and the SWinFlash program. When i run the SWinflash.exe it said that it couldn't find the bios.wph file. So all i had to do was to move the 30BBF27.WPH file in the folder of the program and rename it to bios.wph.
So, Problem solved! Anyway, thnx alot JoeNewberry, be well!