HP 5310m HP Business Notebook HP_TOOLS Partition Guidelines - Page 2

1. Introduction As computer technology has advanced, the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) has expanded in an effort to handle new components, larger and more complex chipsets, add‐in cards, and so on. This expansion of the BIOS has made it increasingly intricate. The computer industry's answer to address 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 a preboot partition on all of its commercial notebook computers.1 Along with replacing the traditional BIOS interface, the HP partition adds tools to the preboot system environment. The partition is viewable on the hard drive and is labeled as HP_TOOLS. On 2008 and later commercial notebook platforms with the EFI BIOS, HP created the partition as a FAT32 partition, due to EFI BIOS limitations with accessing other partition formats. For more information about EFI, go to http://www.hp.com/go/techcenter 2. Supported Platforms The HP_Tools partition feature described in this document is supported by 2008 and 2009 HP business notebooks. 3. Location of HP EFI and Preboot Applications- the HP_TOOLS Fat32 Partition 2