I have an HP Pavilion dv6-6173cl from like 2011; it does everything I need and I do not want to spend money replacing it. I was gonna switch from Debian -> Ubuntu and had some great idea about switching it to the GPU so my kid could use it for Minecraft...so I went in the BIOS, changed a GPU setting from AUTO to one of them...and poof, no screen or external display works.
There are no official CMOS reset instructions for this model, just generic ones, which I have tried. I have, from HP, the last 2 UEFI setups and the last 4 BIOS's. I am able to use another PC to make a generic BIOS recovery USB from the UEFI setup, and I am able to extract the last 4 bioses, and I am able to use Andy's Phoenix tool to extract the Bin files to "sig" and "bin.dec" files. One thing is the actual bios exe (sp55068.exe) will NOT run to make the recovery USB (2 popup errors, "WDM: Get support mode error!" and "BIOS did not support InsydeFlash!")
I have tried many combinations of the following:
- Make a FAT or FAT32 USB named "HP_TOOLS" of 2GB and 4GB usb sticks
- Filling the USB stick with the encrypted BIOS, or the decrypted BIOS and Sig in "Hewlett-Packard/BIOS/Current" or in the root. I've tried various combinations of the extension being all or no caps. I have also seen/tried renaming the bios file to "SMC.BIN" in the root based on what I've seen in a forum.
- Powering on holding Winkey+B with the recovery stick plugged in or not plugged in.
- Powering on holding Winkey+V with the recovery stick plugged in or not plugged in.
- Various lengths of holding keys/power button.
- Trying various combinations of clears involving removing batteries (CMOS + laptop), holding power, etc.
I get nothing with any of these. When I power the laptop on, I get the power LED white, Wifi LED orange, touchpad border lit, badge on the back of the screen lit, caps lock NOT blinking, and screen stays black (no backlight). I have never seen the activity lights on the USB drives blink, so I can't verify it ever reads.
The ONLY thing that changes what I see, is if i power the laptop off, hold the power button down, it turns on and I keep holding the power, after about 10 seconds it powers off, I keep holding, it then powers on again...and this time, the same lights are on but now the caps lock LED blinks about 1 time/second. Doing this with multiple combinations of keypresses does nothing. different.
I even went so far as to take the mainboard out and bake it to reflow the solder. It's doing the same thing as before; the reflow made no difference.
I'm stumped, and can't fathom trashing this laptop because of this. I can't justify a new one because I don't use this every day, but when I need it I need it. I have a feeling that my USB structure isn't exactly correct, the file names aren't exact, the key press order isn't exact...something like that, but I feel like I've tried everything. Any help would be appreciated.
