EliteBook 840 G1 Booting Issue

[Zidanet]

Hello everyone,

I have an EliteBook 840 G1 that I got a few weeks ago. Starting last Thursday it has been giving me issues with booting.

Basically, whenever I turn the laptop off, the next time I try to boot it, it would freeze at the HP screen (with the text "Press the ESC key for startup menu" on the bottomleft). Nothing I do (ESC key, F10 key, etc) makes it progress any further.

The only way I have been bypassing this problem is by removing the battery for 20 seconds before replacing and booting - at which point it will go past the HP screen and enter Windows as normal. I have previously had a simlar problem where the same laptop cannot recover from Standby, but rolling the video driver back to an older version solved that problem.

Has anyone had (or heard of) this problem with this laptop before? While it is still possible for me to to get into Windows and work, it is starting to get really irritating. Any help would be appreciated.

[Esky013]

Hi Zidanet

You may have already done this, but I'll just check - have you updated the BIOS?  There's a new version, 1.20, out now.  Applying this may fix any BIOS errors that could be causing the problem.

Andrew

[Zidanet]

The laptop is currently taken by my coworker on a business trip. I'll give that a try when he comes back with it. Thanks!

[Esky013]

Hi Zidanet

I tried the BIOS update yesterday and Win 7 started playing up - very slow performance.

Tried it with Win 8 and as soon as I applied the ATI Graphics driver, it blue-screened and had to restore a long way back.

I didn't have either of these issues before the BIOS update, so be careful!

I'm going to send my results to HP as I have an open case for multiple issues on the 840.  I'll see what I can find out.

Cheers

Andrew

[ParallaxView]

What we (my fellow co-workers and I) are seeing with the 840 G1, is we can set the laptops up on power just fine.  We might spend two or three days setting the laptops up, and never see an issue.

The problem appears to be we hand the laptop over to a new hire who boots the laptop up in training, not on a power adapter, and then thing locks up on boot.  They get to the Windows logon screen, and the laptop is frozen and appears to be repeating a piece of the Windows logon music in a loop.  One of my coworker dubbed it the "UFO" sound, so we call them UFO's.

I haven't tried pulling the battery to prevent it.  I will have to give it a try.  I have one sitting right here that has this issue, and it is on BIOS version 01.20 7/28/2014.

Since we are thinking the issue is a power issue, I tried installing “HP Peak Power Manager (International)” from the HP download site for the 840 G1 http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/swdHome?javax.portlet.begCacheTo... , but the install said the system didn’t support the software.

At first we were getting this problem here and there, but it's like the issue has got worse the more 840 G1's we have ordered.  We are going to ship our last order back and go with another model.  We currently have 149 EliteBook 840 G1 laptops.

We have contacted HP support several times on the issue, but no one has been able to resolve the issue.

[Zidanet]

Parallax, at least the ones you're dealing with actually reaches Windows.

In my case, the laptop only goes as far as the HP boot screen. We don't even get to see the "Starting Windows" screen.

[sman26]

Zidanet,

Just had a user give me a call and claim the exact same issue you explained with her 840g1 where it will freeze on the HP circular logo and "press escape for startup..." message.  Did you find a fix for this?  As you mentioned, we also tried the battery removal trick and that works but to do that everytime and remove that back cover would be a pain.  There must be a solution.

Thanks.

Shawn

[roymeboy]

I work in desktop support and we have a lot of these laptops out on the estate. The issues we have had with them all seem to now be resolved.

We have not had to update the bios to resolve any of our problems, we have had to update the network card drivers and the video drivers. After these two updates things seem ok and well again, we had months of issues as the video update was only released about 2 weeks ago, I had a lot of complaints. Replaced motherboards and all sorts for them, only to find out it was the drivers.

Issues we saw were mainly laptops not resuming from sleep properly if at all, displays not working correctly if at all, laptops locking up with a black screen and a cursor but nothing else, these problems were all related to the video driver.
We also had a wifi switching issue that would cause locking up and the strange UFO sounds the user above mentioned mainly when resuming from sleep, we found when we plugged a live network cable in, it would wake up instantly, changing the network driver resolved this one.

Good luck all, I feel the headache with this model, and I'd love to know of any faults I haven't seen with it yet.

Zidanet, first do a power drain to eliminate any possibilities there as hp are known for that, take battery out, charger out etc.. hold power button 30 seconds, put back together. Then do above mentioned updates and the bios just in case and see how you get on, if you still have faults, I'd log a case with HP.
We use legacy boot, sounds like you are using UEFI boot if you have the HP logo with a spinning circle, I don't have any experience with it so don't know of any problems with UEFI.

Whoa, hold on, yes I do. We recently had some 800 G1 desktops in, now on older HP's, Z400, Z210 they sometimes hang at boot with a flashing cursor for about 20 seconds before continuing. To stop this happening, you disable EFI boot sources. On 800 G1's, if you do this, often at reboot it will say "no option to boot to". Putting EFI boot sources back on resolved this problem for me. Never know, that may help, if you need UEFI boot mode, probably not, but what the hell, it may be related, have a play.