[rickdanna]

Hi, I have a HP 2133 Mininote and I'm having the following issues.

1. On boot I get a BIOS Error (FFFF and many random others)
2. I cannot boot from USB stick with the HP flash utility.
3. The BIOS (press in F10 during start) gives me boot options HDD & Network only.

I have tried the following:

1. Created a Vista USB flash install (doesn't work as I can't boot from USB (see problems .2)

2. Have partioned the drive on another PC creating 2 partitions (a 10gb & 100gb)setting the 10gb a active.
I did manage to install BartPE onto 10gb partition and successfully booted into PE pressing F7 continually during BartPE start up.

3 Tried various Windows based BIOS flash utilities within PE to no avail.

4. BartPE recognises USB Flashdrive and USB External DVD drive. Tried to run setup from Vista Ultimate DVD, gets to Starting Windows... then I get a blue screen with "Windows prevented from starting....)"

5. Tried to run AFUDOS.exe within BartPE in an attempt to flash the BIOS, but I got "Not a valid win32 Application error".

Can anyone out there be able to help me solve this issue??

I believe that if I upgrade the BIOS it may give me the USB boot option which may enable me to run an install of Vista from a USB source.

Any help is really appreciated

[mikez]

Is the USB stick formatted and installed in the machine *before* you power up the machine?
Can you boot from the same stick in another machine?

The "BIOS USB boot option" is not missing, it is a dynamically generated list,
if there isn't any entry there for the USB device, that just means it was not
found when the BIOS did device discovery (done before you see anything on-screen).

Check your other pages of your BIOS, see if you changed anything that might effect
USB device discovery.

The ultimate fall-back is to enable PXE (network) booting and boot from the files stored on another machine over your *wired* network.

[rickdanna]

OK, definately cannot boot from USB Flash or DVD.

Did however set PXE using a guide I googled for, although I'm not sure how to setup the config file so I can boot the HP Flash Utility.

Can anybody point me to a guide that will help me set up PXE to boot the HP BIOS Flash Utility.

Thanks.

[Thecube92]

okey
Tftpd32 for Windows - Unleash the PXE BIOS Network Boot Feature Within - the freeware review
theres a guide