Kitz Forum

Computers & Hardware => PC Hardware => Topic started by: loonylion on January 28, 2016, 02:25:47 PM

Title: bios whitelisting
Post by: loonylion on January 28, 2016, 02:25:47 PM

So my HP laptop (bought 2nd hand from fleabay for £150) has a totally cr@p wireless card in it that broke my debian install. No problem ill buy a decent Intel.

Nope. As soon as I put it in and turned the thing on it came up saying it had detected an illegal wireless card and disabled it. Much research later, it appears to have an RSA encrypted BIOS that cant be modified to remove the whitelisting and when I tried to manually flip the disable bit in the PCIe configuration space it wouldnt stick.

HP can go die in a fire, I'm never buying another of their products.

Title: Re: bios whitelisting
Post by: AArdvark on January 28, 2016, 08:40:48 PM

Can I ask which specific model of laptop the HP is?
You will be surprised what is 'floating' around on the inter web!! :)
 

Sent from my LG G3 via Tapatalk (Typos & bad formatting are free)

Title: Re: bios whitelisting
Post by: loonylion on January 28, 2016, 08:54:30 PM

its a Probook 6465b (AMD Llano) with an F.20 bios. fully loaded, I got a good deal aside from the damn whitelist and crappy wireless NIC. Probably cant upgrade the WWAN modem to LTE either because of said whitelist.

Title: Re: bios whitelisting
Post by: loonylion on February 04, 2016, 02:24:28 PM

after much more research as far as I can see I'm stuck with this crappy 1x1 broadcom card. HP aren't interested and just make excuse after excuse trying to justify the unjustifiable. Seems nothing short of a class action lawsuit would change their minds.

Title: Re: bios whitelisting
Post by: tickmike on February 19, 2016, 02:01:03 PM

What about using a usb WiFi dongle ?. :hmm:

Title: Re: bios whitelisting
Post by: loonylion on February 19, 2016, 04:18:18 PM

Quote from: tickmike on February 19, 2016, 02:01:03 PM

What about using a usb WiFi dongle ?. :hmm:

they're generally cr@p as well, plus I dont really want stuff sticking out where it could get knocked and broken

Title: Re: bios whitelisting
Post by: Chunkers on February 22, 2016, 04:33:22 AM

I have this issue with my Dell laptops, really annoying.  In the case of the Dell on certain Intel chipsets you can get around this by using the "cover Pin 20 with insulating tape (https://communities.intel.com/thread/51030?start=0)" technique, this works on my e6420 and might work for other laptops - not sure.

It does work but it is fiddly and super-annoying, you might want to google it in case its an option.

Chunks

Title: Re: bios whitelisting
Post by: HPsauce on February 22, 2016, 10:31:08 AM

I've had success with that pin-covering technique in the past, IIRC it was an HP laptop.