HP DV6-6120us blinking cursor on black screen (BIOS ?)
Good day folks. A former colleague of mine asked me for my opinion on this HP laptop which is not booting. The model is DV6-6120us (see picture). When you press the power button, all you get is a blinking underscore in the top-left of a black screen, which is what you normally see on all machines just before the HDD takes over and starts to boot the operating system. This one does nothing: no startup logo, no text, no options to press a key to do something, nothing - just this one dash. It also seems to double-boot: after you hit the power button, the power light comes on, then it goes off and comes back on after a few seconds before displaying the aforementioned screen. I think it's a BIOS issue.
What I tried so far:
-THIS method which worked before on another HP laptop: I tried unpacking the official BIOS from HP's support page for this model to get the BIN file, which I then copied to a flash drive and tried the WIN key + B trick to try and flash it - it didn't work: no matter how many times I tried it, the laptop would never get into the flashing mode and would just go straight back to the blinking cursor. I was also unlucky to have a blank "MODEL" field in the .ini file of this particular BIOS, though I tried several variations of the same file, even changed the extension, but it didn't work.
-I then tried it the old fashioned way by directly writing the BIN to the 25q32 IC on the board. I removed it, backed up its contents, erased it, loaded the "new" BIN onto it and tried writing it: it didn't work either because the file is 4.44 Mb and the chip is only 4Mb so the tail end got "cut off". Because of this, the laptop no longer started AT ALL: the power light would just go on for a second, then off - nothing more ! To confirm, I put back the original BIOS I backed up from the IC when I first desoldered it, which just brought me back to the white dash again, so it's the BIN file that is at fault - not the chip. I think it's because it's not an actual DUMP, but an UPGRADE, hence those extra 0.44Mbs which keep it from fitting on the IC...I would therefore like to request a dump for this, or at least any other suggestion in case anybody has one. Thank you !
What I tried so far:
-THIS method which worked before on another HP laptop: I tried unpacking the official BIOS from HP's support page for this model to get the BIN file, which I then copied to a flash drive and tried the WIN key + B trick to try and flash it - it didn't work: no matter how many times I tried it, the laptop would never get into the flashing mode and would just go straight back to the blinking cursor. I was also unlucky to have a blank "MODEL" field in the .ini file of this particular BIOS, though I tried several variations of the same file, even changed the extension, but it didn't work.
-I then tried it the old fashioned way by directly writing the BIN to the 25q32 IC on the board. I removed it, backed up its contents, erased it, loaded the "new" BIN onto it and tried writing it: it didn't work either because the file is 4.44 Mb and the chip is only 4Mb so the tail end got "cut off". Because of this, the laptop no longer started AT ALL: the power light would just go on for a second, then off - nothing more ! To confirm, I put back the original BIOS I backed up from the IC when I first desoldered it, which just brought me back to the white dash again, so it's the BIN file that is at fault - not the chip. I think it's because it's not an actual DUMP, but an UPGRADE, hence those extra 0.44Mbs which keep it from fitting on the IC...I would therefore like to request a dump for this, or at least any other suggestion in case anybody has one. Thank you !
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