[SOLVED] WiFi card incompatibility

[sasalakic99]

Hello guys!
Today I got a Lenovo G570 as a spare laptop. I own for an HP ProBook 4530s, so I transfered some of the parts from my Lenovo to My HP and ran into problems. It appears that the HP has the whitelist in its BIOS, thus disabling the WiFi card automatically. Lenovo uses the Atheros ar5b95 card with a ar9285 wifi.
Now, I saw few tutorials on trying to rebrand the ar928x cards, and there thay said that ar9285 cards should be whitelisted, in other words it should work with probook 45x0 series, so i dont know where is the catch? If anyone has some experience with this and could help me?

P.S. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/rebranding-the-atheros-928x-cards-the-guide.115110/
In this guide they are trying to rebrand the ar9280 card to ar9285 card which i originally have, so it could work with HP ProBook series 45x0s which i also originally have! Also I know that i could just buy another card on ebay for cheap, but where is the fun in that?

 

[kerberos_20]

if card detects as lenovo instead of hp, then its not whitelisted
thats the first thing mentioned in your link

 

[bill001g]

I was thinking you didn't see this whitelist issue. Then I looked and you are using a almost 10yr old laptop.

HP and a couple other manufactured used to have this whitelist crap. Maybe they still do on some lines. Laptops sold to enterprise level companies they want the devices to be exactly the same. They do not even want them substituting different revisions of any of the chips. In theory this allows easy swap of part and long term stability with applications.
I more think it was purely a way for HP to be able to overcharge for parts with their name on a sticker.

HP is really tricky when it comes to the whitelist. They will sometimes have the part manufactured to return a special code in some way. I know for optical SFP modules used in their switches you could not use other brands even though they were all identical specs all manufactured by finisar.

You might get lucky but HP tries really hard to prevent you from using anything except official HP parts in laptops like this.

Maybe use a USB device instead. The old laptops only whitelist very old tech, likely none of the 802.11ac and especially not wifi6 or wifi6e stuff.

 

[sasalakic99]

So basically the only way to make this work is to go ahead an try to rebrand the WiFi card so it looks like an HP variant of the same model that I already have? I think even if its possible, the links for the tools and guides are probably dead by now, and I dont even know if its possible to do on a newer versions of Windows.

and yeah, I totally agree, whitelisting is just a way of selling the same thing I get in other laptops, but at a bigger price vecause it has “hp” encoded into it. They said they would get rid of whitelist with the new BIOS update, but they had not updated bios version in years, which makes sense given the age of the laptop.
Still it would be an intresting project to do if someone has the time and will to help me.