Invalid Dell service tag?

[king1]

A lot of bugs can be worked around by enabling certain kernel parameters, if you know what the issue is.
I've had issues with IOMMU settings and USB stuff sometimes, or having to force a specific video mode, and others.

I've played around with a lot of hardware configurations and there's some that Windows was never happy with either. Yes that was with older versions like 95/98, XP etc. I know it's not as bad now, but you can still get weird problems sometimes.

Sometimes it simply just came down to the BIOS being garbage, especially on cheap motherboards (PC Chips, Chaintech etc). I'd say the early BIOS on that HP fit into that category. There was nothing wrong with the hardware, even though it acted exactly like a hardware issue.

Yeah, in my case its apparently due to a faulty intel microcode update and adding dis_ucode_ldr to grub.conf was supposed to get around this issue, but didnt seem to do anything, but i may have got the syntax incorrect, as it was a bit unclear how i was supposed to add it, but the way i understood it to be was to add straight after the line that reads "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT"

Anyway, some good news, I was able to update the BIOS and its all working.
I had to do the update through windows, it was freezing with any revision i tried with the built in bios flash utility.

that's odd, Linux is usually better at keeping drives online...

this is my goto for absolutely stuffed drives
https://www.hddsuperclone.com/

I use the livecd and usually clone to another connected drive,  it can save progress for restarting and uses three or four different methods for scraping data off bad sectors...  on a really bad drive i did a while back  which windows wouldn't even fire up it took 48 hours plus but managed to get the majority of the data off.

One i did Thursday trying to recover the thunderbird data that couldn't be copied (300 odd bad sectors),  it took about 8 hours to get the clone which then allowed me to copy off the thunderbird data completely...

Yeah, i usually find linux does it better.
I think with this drive it might be one of those instances where you need to desolder a particular component off the board and presto, it all works again, seen a few videos on this in the past.
In this case this drive contains all the 2FA data stored in session with chrome for a google account, i cant log back into the account on another device because the user never updated his contact information and the 2FA code gets sent to his old phone number.
I have seen a similar utility called open super clone, which im guessing is a fully open source alternative.

good to know I can get an updated version now...