Ok, I'm fairly competent when it comes to servicing computers, and have rebuilt many laptops for people over the years.
I have a DV7-7121nr model notebook, running BIOS revision f.23, which happens to be RSA encrypted.
I attempted to get a warranty repair for a faulty blu-ray drive, as my drive will not properly write to any discs above and beyond CDR (700mb) capacity. HP said that they would send me a replacement drive, but that I had to run through all of these diagnostic procedures, which I did.. they finally agreed to send a drive, but after a few calls from their tech center I just gave up trying to get them to ship the drive.. I bought a new drive online, which suffers the same problem.
I wound up verifying that the drive was never the issue in the end, as the drive writes properly when installed into other laptops.
My concern is that I want to start from the first BIOS revision (f.05) and work my way up to the latest bios, testing the drive, to verify if the problem is related to BIOS. Is there a problem with the image, or is it in fact not for this model notebook, and improperly posted on the website? I also don't suppose that there is a way to remove or disable the bios whitelist? I'd like to upgrade my networking hardware to 802.11ac hardware since this 802.11n adapter is not that great (even compared to laptops with older 802.11n hardware in my house).