NM. I finally found a place where a extract-to-disk was actually available. Upgrading bios as i'm typing this ☺️
(from here: https://drivers.eu/Notebooks/Compaq/Armada+M300/BIOS)

hopefully helping anyone else browsing here in the future...

Thanks for posting this! I've just got a pair of these laptops (with different things wrong with them, so trying to make one good one!). One has a boot error "101 I/O ROM Error" but boots anyway. So I'm hoping flashing the BIOS might help ...

By the way, my M300 also had a whole group of keys fail to register - I noticed you posted about this same issue in a different thread. Perhaps a common problem with this model then? 🙁 My solution was to buy the second M300 with broken screen hinges but working keyboard and swap them ...

justin1985 wrote on 2024-06-06, 20:36:

Thanks for posting this! I've just got a pair of these laptops (with different things wrong with them, so trying to make one good one!). One has a boot error "101 I/O ROM Error" but boots anyway. So I'm hoping flashing the BIOS might help ...

By the way, my M300 also had a whole group of keys fail to register - I noticed you posted about this same issue in a different thread. Perhaps a common problem with this model then? 🙁 My solution was to buy the second M300 with broken screen hinges but working keyboard and swap them ...

Don't mention it. I'm glad to help 😀

yeah, i found some crust inside the original keyboard and i did not feel too keen on opening it up trying to fix it (even if i do have electric paint, etc available. Its just too much of a hassle). I ended up sourcing a new keyboard (an Azerty one where i prefer a qwerty one - key swap is imminent) and now at least everything works.

Fingers crossed for your endevours in making a fully working laptop. They are quite neat 😀