BIOS Updates forum

I have a Digital Hinote Ultra 2000 laptop. It's a great little system for its age and I use it constantly for dialing in to work, E-mail, scanning, and working with images using Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop.

I've seen comments on Compaq's website and elsewhere that the Armada 6500 is esentially a clone of the Hinote Ultra 2000.

I therefore purchased an Armada 6500 DVD-rom hoping to use it on the Hinote. Unfortunately the Hinote BIOS seems not to recognize the DVD-Rom drive. Shortly after booting with the DVD installed it says, "non-system disk mounted" as if it thinks the DVD-rom is a floppy drive. In addition the open-tray button is inoperative.

I am using V1.07 of the Hinote BIOS, the last upgrade available for that platform. Since the Armada 6500 and the Hinote Ultra 2000 are so similar I am wondering if I could attempt to to flash the Hinote with the Armada 6500 V1.54 BIOS which , I presume, supports the DVD-Rom.

The BIOS says it is made by Digital and I don't know what file name to use for a BIOS file on a recovery diskette should the Armada BIOS not work at all.

Any thoughts or suggestions? Am I courting disaster?

Don't flash the BIOS unless you have a way to fix it if it fails (which is very hard to do because most notebooks have the Flash ROM chip soldered on the system board).