TRying to upgrade BIOS via commandline (SCCM)

[Ron Feldman]

We created a distrbution that upgrades the BIOS firmware using "HPQFLASH.EXE -s -a" and after the install a psshutdown command is issued. There are some systems that get the firmware and others that report a return code within the log file of 0x103. and the bios is not upgraded. Why is that and how can we repair?

[RobinHerbert]

Thought I'd help here even though this post is many years old. You never know, someone else might find this useful!

I seem to have experienced most of the different errors with HPQFlash, and this is my table of return codes discovered;

Hex - Dec - Meaning

0x80 - 128 - Wrong password (i.e., password extracted from file doesn't match that used on BIOS)

0x103 - 259 - Password file not found (i.e., either you need to use the -p option, or the file path used is incorrect)

0x111 - 273 - BIOS is already the same version

0x118 - 280 - BIOS installed is newer than the one you're attempting to install

0x122 - 290 - Bitlocker enabled (i.e., if you continued, you'd need the recovery key to re-enable the drive)

And of course

0xBC2 - 3010 - Reboot required (especially if using -s option)

Of course, I hope the original poster isn't still waiting for the answer!

Having said that, looking at the log file, on the 18th August 2011 at 14:50, it returns a success code on 0x0. Not until 4 days later when apparently HPQFLASH is run with a "/?" command is the 0x103 returned. Which is odd, and doesn't match my  experience of the return codes... Maybe more has changed in the last four years than I realised!