I need to reflash my BIOS. I looked up the info on HP’s site and saw what appears to be two possible motherboards for my PC model under the BIOS dowload tab:
When I examine my motherboard, I find the designation:
H-ALVORIX -R58800 uATX
It contains part of the name of both BIOS dowloads. Are these in fact two different boards or are they the same board and HP just listed them each with different partial names? (One has “Alvorix” and the other has “uatx”) I don’t want to get this wrong. I hear that if I attempt to install the wrong BIOS, my computer is done for…
I’ve run belarc and three other similiar programs. They detect and detail everything BUT the motherboard. Depending on the program, its either left blank or says “unknown”.
Don’t worry about the slight difference in models. Get the most recent version (6.11) which covers both the older model motherboard (“Alvorix” in the name) and the newer one (sans “Alvorix”). Most motherboard manufacturers make single BIOSes that cover small changes in motherboards (for instance, a different sound chip in a later production version motherboard). The BIOS firmware itself will recognize either version of motherboard and call the proper BIOS initialization routines.
Now if “uATX” is just the size of the board, I think I can disregard that discrepeny. And if Alvorix is the manufacturer, then its just missing from the first download.But one starts with “H” and the other starts with “N”.
I’m hoping they’re the same board. but if they are not, I don’t want to trust that the firmware will recognize different versions. I’m told downloading the improper BIOS is fatal to the board.
I think the BIOS was damaged. My PC froze, and I was forced to do a hard reboot. It hung/froze during the booting process too (before loading OS). I was forced to hard reboot again, during the booting process. Then its showed an error: “not enough space in runtime area. BIOS settings will not be available”, or something similiar. I can no longer even access the BIOS menu, and the PC has a “restart loop” when turned on, restarting several times in 30 seconds before finally showing the runtime error and loading OS. I reset the BIOS by pulling the battery, and even put in a new one, but the problem persists. And now its causing Windows to fail validation. So I think I’m out of options.
I didn’t install any software or hardware prior to this issue. I don’t know what caused the initial freeze up of the OS, but I suspect the BIOS was damaged on the second hard reboot when I powered down in the middle of it loading the BIOS stuff.
Ahh, that’s a typical bad memory stick(s) symptom. If you have more than one memory stick installed, pull out one of the sticks. If the symptoms are still occurring, put it back in and pull out the next stick (and so on). When the symptoms disappear, you’ve found the bad memory stick.