blog.mbirth.de

When I got my Spectre x360 back in 2016, I booted it into the Windows 10 it came with, played a bit around and then decided to put Linux on it. So I took a backup of all partitions, repartitioned the whole SSD and went on with Linux. Of course, I found a way to install BIOS updates which I regularly did.

Now came the time to sell the machine so I restored my backup to have to original state from back then. To give the buyer a better experience, I wanted to restore it to its factory state using the now restored recovery partition. The recovery process started up just fine and prepared the main partition and started doing things ... until it failed with a strange error message. Trying it over and over again, it always failed at the same step after completely installing the Windows operating system, not very far into installing the OEM software.

The LED in the mute key doesn't work out of the box. To enable it, add a file /etc/modprobe.d/hp-spectre.conf with the following contents:

BIOS updates are actually done via the hidden HP_TOOLS service partition which you can get to by pressing F2 after switching on the notebook or from the Startup Menu. The update you download from the hp service page merely copies the new BIOS files to that partition.