Upgrading to the b122 bits on my laptop resulted in a kernel panic and reboots upon boot attempt. See this bug: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6875025

My work-around for this is to boot into my working BE (b121) and do the following:

beadm mount b122 /mnt

copy from /kernel to /mnt/kernel these bits:

/kernel/kmdb/amd64/sata
/kernel/kmdb/sata
/kernel/misc/sata
/kernel/misc/amd64/sata

and these:

/kernel/drv/amd64/ahci
/kernel/drv/ahci

then:

bootadm update-archive -R /mnt

My system then booted successfully to b122.

Before I proceed any further; flashing your bios incorrectly/incompletely CAN and most likely WILL render your machine useless. The information which I am providing worked/works on my specific machine. 

Now to the task at hand. Having only OpenSolaris on this machine and wishing to update my bios firmware I had two choices:

• use a recovery disc I made after purchase, which would entail installing Vista for the sole purpose of this procedure
  
• use a usb stick with the needed bin on it and flash from that

I chose the latter and here's how I did it:

1. Download the spXXXXX.exe from hp site
   
2. unpack the .exe using cabextract
   
3. rename the extension from xxxx.FD to  xxxx.BIN  /* x = the alphanumeric string proceeding the extension */
4. insert USB key ; cp xxxx.BIN /media ; umount /media  ; shutdown
   
5. Remove the battery from the unit
6. Unplug mains
7. Hold down 'Windows' and 'B' keys ; re-plug mains and press power button
8. After the flash completes and before the machine starts, remove the USB key
9. Done
   

I recently installed OpenSolaris (the first attempts were using the current release, which was quite buggy, I managed with OpenSolaris 2009.06 snv_111 X86) on my HP dv 7-1245ca.

A few notes are:

• the livecd as well as the hard drive install booted with a squelching white noise, I appended "-B disable-audiohd=true" to the grub boot line.
• This laptop has an ATI 3200 HD video card, which works with the radeonhd driver 1.2.4. To enable I shutdown GDM and ran Xorg -configure then restarted X/GDM.
• Both the wired and wifi network interfaces work well.

The specs are here for this machine. I am currently running Ubuntu 9.04, the development version of Ubuntu. I also run virtualbox on it with Opensolaris 2008.06 as the guest O/S ... I haven't had a chance to work out some issues precluding installation of OSOL as a dual-boot option.