Recently we had a need to run full system diagnostics on a 1.5 year old HP Notebook. So we visited the HP PC Hardware Diagnostics page from hp.com and downloaded the ‘HP PC Hardware Diagnostics 3-in-1 USB Key’ utility (filename: sp72497.exe).
Once the sp72497.exe file is downloaded onto your computer, it needs to be extracted into an automatically created folder called ‘swsetup’. First of all, make sure that when you extract sp72497.exe that it is being extracted on an HP Desktop or HP Notebook. We were attempting to extract it onto a Dell computer and we kept receiving a message that the C drive did not have enough free space. When it actually had almost 700GB of drive space available on C. So make sure you extract it using an HP computer. Since it is an HP diagnostic utility it only makes sense that it is happiest with an HP computer product.
Once extracted into the swsetup folder make sure you have your USB flash drive ready as it will automatically ask for it to be inserted. Once inserted it asks what drive letter the USB flash drive has been assigned. Look under Computer and enter the assigned drive letter and hit enter. Follow additional prompts.
Once the USB flash drive is ready, go ahead and insert it into the HP computer that you need to diagnose if it isn’t already. Reboot the HP computer and immediately press the Esc key. This will bring up a list of startup options. Select F2 for Diagnostics.
HP Diagnostics CSO Number and Agent ID
Now this is where we ran into an issue. Once we pressed F2 for Diagnostics it immediately prompted us to enter a CSO Number. What is a CSO Number? It stands for Customer Service Order number. Since this utility is used by HP field technicians this is where the field tech would enter the order number for the service call. To make a long story short, we simply entered 1234 for the CSO Number and that was accepted. It then prompted us for an Agent ID, and once again we entered 1234 which at that point gave us access to run a variety of diagnostics. In the below image you can see both CSO Number and Agent ID. We hope this additional information helps someone else.
