HP EliteBook Notebook PCs - How to Change or Customize the BIOS Logo

As computer technology has advanced, the BIOS has expanded to handle new components, larger and more complex chipsets, add-in cards, and so on. This forced expansion of the BIOS has made it increasingly cumbersome.

The computer industry’s answer to BIOS limitations is the development of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). EFI is a set of modular interfaces that replaces the set of traditional BIOS interfaces between the operating system and platform firmware.

EFI is based on the high-level C language and is driver-based, scalable, and easy to debug and upgrade. EFI uses a modular, platform-independent architecture that can perform boot and other BIOS functions.

Tapping into this technology, HP has implemented an EFI partition on all of its commercial notebook computers. Along with replacing the traditional BIOS interface, the HP version of the EFI partition adds tools to the preboot system environment. The HP EFI partition is viewable on the hard drive and is labeled as HP_TOOLS. On 2008 commercial notebook platforms with the EFI BIOS, HP created the EFI partition as a FAT32 primary partition, due to EFI limitations with accessing other partition formats. Total EFI partition size is 1 GB.

For more information about EFI, go to the HP Technology center page. Click here to view the "HP Technology center" page (http://www.hp.com/go/techcenter).

The EFI BIOS allows you to customize the logo displayed during the boot. The logo is a bitmap file that you can add or change on the EFI partition.

Here are the steps to customize the BIOS logo:

1. Access the Computer Setup utility, and select System Configuration.

2. Select Device Configurations, UEFI Boot Mode, Enabled.

3. Select the custom logo image you want to use, and then use the imaging software to convert the image to a bitmap (.bmp), and modify the image size to 1024 x 768 or smaller, as necessary.

4. In the Hewlett-Packard folder on the HP_TOOLS partition, create a Logo subfolder.

5. Save the image in the \Hewlett-Packard\Logo folder.

6. Rename the image as Hplogo.bmp.

7. Reboot the computer, and press the F10 key to enter Setup.

8. Select System Configuration, and then select Boot Options.

9. Select Custom Logo, and then select Enabled.

10. Save the changes, and exit Setup.

The custom logo displays on the boot screen.