Bios Mods - The Best BIOS Update and Modification Source

Hey all,

Total newbie here, with bioses at least fairly competent otherwise. My mother's HP M9350f was having issues booting for a while. My current bios version is 5.24. It would often hang at the looking for storage devices screen or at the initial bios screen where one was given options for entering setup or boot menu (please excuse my total lack of knowledge on the correct terms). I thought it was the hard drive. Apparently the hard drive that came stock had bad firmware and the problem was made worse every time the drive was booted. I ordered it a new one. In the mean time had my her booting a liveusb of ubuntu so she could serf the web while we waited for the new drive. It still hung in the same spots occasionally so I figured the malfunctioning hdd may have messed up the bios during one of its failed boots and planed to update/re-flash it when the new drive came and windows was up and running. When the new drive arrived and I popped in the windows disc I discovered that the computer wouldn't see any SATA drives at all.

This thread on the HP forums is relevant http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Loc...1273#M6746

It seems that I'm not the only one having this issue.

I've looked around a little and I found this thread on the Pegatron vm2n7b-la Violet: http://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-Pe...date-Issue

I don't really understand most of the content of that thread to be totally honest. On top of that I'm having a different issue and my hardware is different.

I have no idea what I'm doing or if flashing a fresh bios could even solve the problem.

UPDATE:

I looked around a little more and decided to give flashing the bios a try. I followed the Mr. Wiskey Tango's instructions in the Pegatron thread posted in my OP

Found the HP bios for my model on the software site but couldn't figure out how to extract the .bin file from the installer. I unpacked the original .exe but the installer.exe inside that wouldn't let me in.

So I grabed the VIO5.29.bin file Mr. Wiskey Tango posted from the Pegratron thread because I figured it's might work. I renamed it hpbios.rom.

The first time I executed || Aufdos hpbios.rom /P /B /N /C /E /K || I got a "Bios doesn't have EC" error. I rebooted and tried || Aufdos hpbios.rom /P /B /N ||. The flash worked that time and all seemed well. So I powered off and rebooted. Now I get one long beep repeated over and over again and a blank screen.

So I took out all the extra cards and tried to boot using onboard. No beeps but still a blank screen. I read somewhere, the Pegatron thread I think, that with 5.29 onboard no longer works and a addon card must be used.

The addon card is back in and I'm trying the method found in the link below for a blind vbios flash.
http://www.bjorn3d.com/2010/04/bootable-...99sfUilgUR

Any suggestions to anything else I can try? Did I use the wrong BIOS? If so how the [censored] do I get at the bios in the installer.exe file?