HP 712 Firmware Patch

[Aryseche]

I recently picked up a HP 712/80 workstation. I used one (or something of the same vintage) back in the 90's but have not seen one since. Everything on the machine seems to work fine. Well, except I can't figure out how to set the RTC after a battery change, but that's a minor thing.

As I've been climbing the learning curve I saw a reference on openpa.net to a firmware update version 2.3. Since I've got 1.6 I was curious about the changes but the links to parisc-linux.org were dead. It took some searching but it was finally archive.org to the rescue. Searching there lead to a page titled "HP 9000 Series 700/800/Visualize Firmware Updates". The download was a 800+ MB archive of assorted HP patches including the one I was looking for (PF_C7120023). Turns out there was nothing I need urgently but to possibly save someone else the hunt I thought I would post them here.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

An excellent first post

 

[tenox]

wow epic thank you!

 

[legodude]

Anyone successfully install this firmware? I'm trying to update my 712, but am not having success. I've created the

C7120023.frm file using the script above, and have set it up in BlueSCSI as a tape drive with 2048 block size, but no luck.

 

[legodude]

To follow up my own post... after a few minutes of DHCP/TFTP configuration followed by a 'boot lan' and I'm now running firmware 2.3. I forgot how easy TFTP can be...

 

[MindWalker]

Thanks @Aryseche and @legodude! With the information on this thread I was able to upgrade my machine from ROM 1.9 to 2.3. I went with the TFTP route and it was indede very easy - once I had figured out how to set it up on my new OpenWRT router (which I bought partly due to wanting to test this!).

I, too, tried to run the .frm file from a ZuluSCSI with various settings - the upgrade script did start but it always failed after the first confirmation and loading the firmware images. Would be great if somebody was able to modify the file to work from a SCSI emulator. For reference-sake here are pics of the output, left is the working run (over TFTP), right is the failed attempt from emulated SCSI device. For some reason the first checksum is correct but it fails on the second.