HP stream 14 ax series laptop hacking atempts - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: kokodin
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2023, 10:04:58 am
content: First of all, this topic is not a call for help, it is ment to serve informative purpose only, but you may ask questions i might not be able to anser :]Topic covers what i discovered that can be done, to a very cut down laptop you wouldn't want even as a cheap christmass gift. So please restrain yourself from comenting about geting a new better one , this is not about high performance, just tinkering with stuff.My quest for upgrading this laptop started around 2 weeks ago when one of my coworkers asked about upgrading storage in her "typewriter" because it was displaying end of free space. After opening it, it was clear we can't do it, and internet kind of agreed on that, but i wasn't satysfied.HP stream 14 ax series is a very atractive looking very slim and colorfull 14 inch thing with long battery life and very poor specsceleron n3060 dual core at 1,6ghz with boost up to 2,5ghz with integrated uhd graphics , total chip power 6,5 W2 or 4 gb of ddr3L memory either soldered directli into the motherboard or in a standard sodim socket, cpu support 2 channels but laptop can use only one32 or 64 gb of integrated eMMC storage directly on the motherboardscreen is glosy 720p tn edp display, no touchand it comes with windows 10 home either in s mode or plaincamera, 3 usb , card reader, phones jack, and hdmi.wifi/bluetoothUpgrading storage in such device is very problematic. there is no sata or nvme ports on board and the only connections you can steal are 2 pcie lines and one usb 2.0 from the wifi module or 1 usb 2.0 from the camera, but we have unpopulated m.2 m key slot that looks promising, because there is power on it. Emmc memory however is locked in the firmware to either 32 or 64 gb and only from registered providers and models, not to mention the chip often fails and boards go on ebay, fully working but no storage. Usually people have 2 choices, either replace the chip to 64gb one , or try to hack into wifi port witrh nvme drive. Both seems to have high failure rates thanks to bios problems.I however decided to make m.2 slot working in it's natural way with no software hacking if possible, upgrading some components along the wayFirst thing i did to crack the laptop was to buy working laptop in a very poor condition, therefore for almost no money. i scored a wreck for the price of the used motherboard ~ 40$ or lessBroken screen, broken keyboard and no charger, battery also broken. lost cause, perfect subject for probing and experimenting.Big plus was that it is a revision of the motherboard i was able to find boardview and schematics for free.After a good read into documentation i decided to replace keyboard for the new pink unit :] and get myself used edp screen from dell computer, but this time 1080p and matt. screen was 15$ in very good condition, while getting oryginaly spec one would cost me 80, to 100.Next step was to buy one of those broken motherboards with no emmc for 10$ to have a spare.And now is the good part.Schematics and board view were very helpfull in discovering that m.2 socket is in fact fully wired to accept sata ssd. All it is missing are 4 10 nF ceramic caps to terminate the lines and the m.2 socket itself.First atempts to sideload a sata port to that were unsuccesfull, as if sata controller was disabled in the bios. And after some more reading of the schematisc i can confirm yes it is disabled, but not forever. It ended up being just a jumper on the bottom of the board telling bios to either use emmc or sata port as a main storage. After moving the jumper resistor to the other side currently working storage should be disabled and the other one enabled. And so i did, and it did work. emmc storage was gone from booting devices.Yesterday i was able to boot up to hiren from flash drive and confirm my 128gb sata ssd i bought for 8$ is fuly working. The only thing left is to train micro soldering to install that m.2 socket, which i will on some pcie to nvme adapters. I already destroyed 3 sockets :] but on fifth atempt i have what looks to be no shorts and fully soldered connector that isn't melted.It would be nice to hack in a battery from a different model of computer because very similar hp batteries are 4 times cheaper than the one that firts. I would laugh at hp with all my might if that ever work.If you are interested in details i would be happy to provide photos and clips from schematic diagrams to save some more crapy laptops from the landfield. Currently typing from work so i have no photos with me to send.

author: kokodin
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 19, 2023, 09:04:23 pm
content: Ok so i will show some work not just empty words.First of all mod was tested on 2 types of motherboardda00p9mb6d0 with soldered 2gb of ramandda0p9mb16d0 with sodim socketUpper part of the motherboard seems to be unchanged, but i only had access to the schematics for the 2gn model.I marked on pictures what had to be aded or changed.So far i am at a stage when i canplug in ssd , install windows on it, and it works 100% ok... untill it go into suspend mode. Due to unfortunate and still not fully understood by me suspend mode circutry , after resuming the system in most cases keyboard and touchpad (both being ps2 interface) do not work . After i tryed to recreate suspend state circutry i came to wierd things happening. Freshly installed windows 10 behaves the sama sa before, suspend mode is broken after resume, no keyboard. But a copy of emmc windows that came with one of the motherboards works the same as fresh install on unmolested board but disables ssd on every boot on a board i installed suspend mode components. and the crazy thing is i once had this board boot up normaly, go into suspend and back with keyboard working but it never happened again and now this installation of windows bluescreening every time after loading graphical interface ,just before usel profile, and it is not ssd specyfic fault, it transfer with copy of the system like a ghost.I was informed about missing keyboard fault by one of the youtubers of all people, and that they couldn't fix it. Can i?Either way i think those laptops are a bit of a scam hp sold to people all over the world , my model is from 2017, so they are not even that old.By the way, i never soldered nvme connectors before, and i only destroyed 6 of them before i was able to install corectly 3 of them.I would really love to test if suspend mode fault persists on pcie sata drive or externally powered 2,5" ssd but i can't find the adapters anywhere in my area.

author: kokodin
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2023, 12:52:13 pm
content: I am thinking out loud right now so corect me if i'm wrong.On provided schematic part we have some resistors values shown as *0_2 *0_2/s *10k_4I am not so sure about the sufix number but i am pretty sure that 0 means 0 ohms.But then some parts of the schematic make no sense.For instance 74AVC1T45 part seems to be paralelled with R39 of 0 ohm where one is shifting logic signal levels, the other just shorts the outputs of the chip. so is that an optional part?But if that is the case is 100k ohm resistor at r16 also an optional parts when you install the q2 transistor? or rather is the q2 network a replacement for the resistor or need to work with it making some voltage divider 3v 10k output 100k gnddoes the mosfet specyfic model play any role

author: kokodin
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 01, 2023, 10:26:54 pm
content: i was able to almost succesfully hack one of those boardsby removing pcie based sd card reader chip, you can make bios confused enough it let you boot windows from sata ssd even if you gave hardware jumper set to emmcthe thing is the jumper setting alone fixes suspend problemsso it must not be a hardware fault but 100% bios faultyou can rplace sd card reader chip by nvme socket (pcie 1x) and place another ssd inside, but without software based efi loader which can load nvme boot drivers you wont be able to boot from it, but only windows, linux can't be booted in this configuration at all because of broken acpisome kind of hp curse