[REMOVED]Compaq Presario C731TU Notebook PC F.35 remove whitelist

[rfincher]

Hi,
I'm a new member, with a Compaq C731TU which is successfully running Mac OS 10.5.8. The inbuilt Atheros 5007EG wireless card cannot easily be made to work in the Hackintosh environment, so I use a Netgear W111v3 USB wireless card with complete success. But with only 3 USB ports, it would be nice to free up one of them by using an internal wireless card other than the Atheros. I've just bought a Broadcom 4321 card (came from a MacBook laptop and supposedly works well in Hackintoshes) but after installing it I get the dreaded 104 Error - Unsupported wireless device detected... etc. I gather that the Broadcom 4321 has been whitelisted in the Compaq's BIOS which is an early InsydeH20 version F.22. So I found this great site (ie this one!) which outlines how to modify the Insyde BIOS to ignore whitelisted wireless devices. But it seems that all the guides assume some version of Windows as the OS from which the BIOS changes are made.

Here is my question. Can I modify this BIOS from the Mac 10.5.8 platform? My Macompaq only has OS 10.5.8 installed. The original Vista Home Basic OS was corrupted, and without actual system CD's I cannot reinstall it. So Mac OSX is all I've got. And there is virtually no user-modifiable stuff on the standard BIOS Setup screen (F10 at startup).

Can anyone advise me, please.

Rob

[camiloml]

Use a WinXP live CD and flash from there and a pendrive.

[rfincher]

Use a WinXP live CD and flash from there and a pendrive.

Thanks very much for your quick reply. I still have a retail copy of Windows XP, and I'll now read the guide carefully to see just how to do it. Will provide feedback in a couple of days, or maybe post some queries if I run into trouble. I must say I'm impressed by the helpfulness of members to each other on this forum. Again thanks.
Rob

[rfincher]

Use a WinXP live CD and flash from there and a pendrive.

Hello Camillo,

Well I've taken your advice, but I haven't got very far. I've created a Win XP Live CD and can get my Compaq to boot from this disk. Pretty weird because of limited Windows functionality, but it seems OK.

I then succeeded in downloading an evaluation copy of WinHex, and an ezh20 file entitled ezh20_2.1.0.4-for boot menu 0204'09-ini new. These were transferred to a USB memory stick (pendrive) and are accessible when operating via Win XP Live CD.

But I don't know how to find the file which hspumanti refers to as "boot.fd".

The only vaguely relevant file available on the HP website, and which I downloaded, was sp38176.exe. The HP blurb said that this package contains WinFlash Utility and a BIOS image of the originally installed BIOS, in my case version F.22. I can inspect this file using WinHex, but it doesn't contain the 104 error message. So I'm thinking this file cannot be or contain boot.fd. This is further confirmed by the fact that ezh20 will not open it.

I realise I just haven't got to the guts of this issue yet, but I now need further guidance. Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks
Rob

[camiloml]

Sorry, i misunderstood you.

If this is your notebook

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=ob-90323-1&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&os=2093&product=3636344&sw_lang=

This is your nonwhitlisted latest bios, ver F.35.

You should flash it booting the WinXP Live CD.

[rfincher]

Sorry, i misunderstood you.

If this is your notebook

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=ob-90323-1&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&os=2093&product=3636344&sw_lang=

This is your nonwhitlisted latest bios, ver F.35.

You should flash it booting the WinXP Live CD.

hi again Camilo,
Thanks veerryy much for the non-whitelisted BIOS file. Yes, my computer is a Compaq C731TU, and I'll attempt to install the new BIOS just as soon as I've worked out how to restore the old BIOS if my machine gets bricked. BTW I did find my way into the *.fd file contained in the download from HP, and I had a lot of fun trawling thru the hex dumps of WinHex to find the JNX instructions etc. but because my version of WinHex was trial/read only, I could not actually edit the 30D9F22.fd file. However, I'm very grateful to you for doing all the work to produce the non-whitelisted file, and that will save me some time too. Again thanks
Rob
EDIT: Great result - this BIOS upgrade worked- no 104 error - and my new Broadcom Wireless Card BCM4321 is in and working perfectly in my Macompaq C731TU under Mac OS10.5.8. I'm a very happy camper!

[camiloml]

Glad it worked