Booting/Rebooting issues with HP Z8 Fury G5 Workstation

[mpmarquez]

I have an HP Z8 Fury G5 Workstation that I am having booting and rebooting issues with. I opened a ticket with HP support and they sent me a new power supply but I am still having the same problems and I'm wondering if anyone else is having the same problems.

With regard to the rebooting issue I leave my applications open on my desktop at the end of the day so I can pick up the at the beginning the next day. I do make sure to save everything. What happens frequently is that the beginning of the next day (really mostly every other day) I notice that the machine has rebooted. I'm not sure if it is hardware or software issues but I have tried to turn off Windows 11 automatic update but it still seems to occur.

I have also set it to perform a clean boot per Microsoft's instructions here, but it still has the issue:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-...

This first problem I have with both the original power supply and the replacement power supply.

I also have another issue where sometimes I try to do a hard power boot of the machine from off using the power button on the front and the HP Wolf Security splash screen comes up for a few seconds and then my display goes to its own control screen stating that it is no longer receiving a video signal from the PC. When this happens I need to try to restart it three or four times using the front power button before I can get Windows to boot. This second problem I saw multiple times with the original power supply. With the replacement I think it has only happened once but it seemed I needed to disconnect the main power cable of the PC before it would let me boot.

I suspect that the two issues could be related. I have the machine plugged into a full sine wave battery UPS with a full battery so it shouldn't be related to issues with the power grid.

I was wondering if anyone else might have experienced any of these issues with their similar machines.

HP Z8 Fury G5 Workstation Desktop PC
Windows 11
Product #: 81R98UT#ABA
Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) w5-3425
BIOS: U61 Ver. 01.01.27 - 10/18/2023

BTW, is there anyway to contact the administrators/webmasters of this HP Community website via email?

I ask because I spent the past two weeks trying to post my question about my HP product and I would receive the following error:
"You do not have sufficient privileges for this resource or its parent to perform this action. Click your browser's Back button to continue."

I couldn't find a link on the website to contact the website administrator for help with the problem. When I spoke to HP technical support by phone discussing my product issue I asked them if they could tell me where to get support for the website but they told me they didn't have any contact info. I tried all the main HP phone numbers but I couldn't get help there either since there was no operator and only a voice menu system. I tried emailing support@hp.com just in case someone there could forward my issue to the correct department but I received no response. I also tried the feedback button on the website to send a message.

[DGroves]

your description may indicate that you have a software or OS related issue not a hardware issue

trying to determine which software is the cause or what in the OS is wrong is usually not worth the needed time to prowl through the windows log files looking for the cause of the reboot

as it's much faster to simply backup user data and do a FULL CLEAN OS RESTORE then let the system sit for 24hr and if no reboots install ONE SOFTWARE APPLICATION, and again wait 24hr if no issues add the next two software apps and again wait 24hr

i suspect you will not have any software or OS related issues

[mpmarquez]

Thanks for the response. The last person I spoke with at HP technical support recommended going to Settings > System > Recovery and  either perform a "Reinstall Now" or "Reset PC" but I really don't want to have to delete all my apps unless I already know that will fix the issue. I thought about just swapping the SSD with one that only has Windows 11 on it and nothing else to see what happens over about a week. However they told me that if I swap it out that it has to be with another HP sourced drive or my warranty would be voided. So I was thinking of just trying it with Windows 11 booted from a USB drive.

[wmc]

I have a brand new Z8-G5 (not Fury) that has VERY WEIRD startup behavior from either a cold boot or Win 11 "restart":

1. Cold boot takes approx 3:50 to get to a logins screen (fresh Win11 install), a time I've not seen since a 1980's Apollo workstation running Unix.  At the 1:06 mark during the boot cycle, the POWER GOES OFF FOR ~0.75 SEC then turns on again and the boot process starts over until at the 3:50 mark a login screen appears.
2. Restart (warm boot) takes as long but the machine runs in "black screen" mode (monitor on but only black signal) after which the Wolf screen displays for the remaining time until the Win 11 login screen appears.

It seems trivial but you may want to check Windows power plans if you haven't already.  My system defaulted to one that was geared more for laptops as it put the machine into hybernation requiring a fresh login after about 10 minutes unattended.

My guess is that this is all tied to overly-intrusive and poorly engineered Wolf / "HP Sure xxxxx" crap.  During the first 3 days of trying to restore / reconfigure the system as the replacement to my Z840 that went **bleep**-up (due to a Windows 10 Update error that lead to an unbootable / unrecoverable system) it seems Wolf was using some A(not so)I to "improve" my security by increasingly blocking simple actions like recovering files from backup, copying files from an external to internal drive, opening pdf files...  So I had to uninstall all Wolf / HP Sure xxx stuff from CP "Programs and Features" so I could work.  Unfortunately I believe most of the boot trouble and inability to run PCIe cards compatible with Win10 / Z840 are due to Wolf / HP Sure Start and Secure Boot "protection" built into the BIOS.

Also, since Day One I have the error event ID 7000 "The l1vhlwf service failed to start due to the following error:
A hypervisor feature is not available to the user" despite the fact that I do not have ANY of Hyper-V / Hypervisor features checked in CP->Programs and Features->Turn Windows features on or off.  Yet this error appears during every boot along with other Hyper-V / Hypervisor virtualization warnings.  Those, I believe are left over from Wolf / HP Sure xxx settings within Windows security framework that are not removed when the applications are uninstalled.

If you have the time and inclination you might try removing all the Wolf / HP Sure xxx crap, remove any PCIe cards not installed by HP (they seem to have set Secure Boot, Sure Start and BIOS TPM logic to indentify such cards as security risks to lock out) and see if anything changes.

BTW, hats off - you actually got to a support person.  I tried for days after my machine arrived with the wrong graphics card (they substituted a $200 cheaper card w/o telling me, amending the packing list / box-side item list, then refused to swap for the one I ordered - I would have to send the ENTIRE SYSTEM back, wait for them to disassemble it, test all the installed components, return them to stock, THEN notify sales the return was complete whereupon sales would schedule the build of the system I had ordered, in theory with the correct gfx card leaving me without a working system and an increasing backlog of client deadlines.)  I only got to talk to A(not so)Is, non-HP employee robo-call center folks who barely speak English, know next to nothing about computers and less about HP products.  HP defenses against actually having to supply some competent common sense customer support are excellent.

[mpmarquez]

Thanks for the response.

Under Settings > System > Power > Screen and sleep I have it set to "Never" for "When plugged in, put my device to sleep after". The only thing I have enabled to turn off is the display after 10 minutes.

I really wonder if the issues I am having are related to the HP Wolf Security software. I just notice odd things about it which make me wonder if it is very robust. Part of the debugging I did for the service tech was booting it with the F2 key held down to bring up the diagnostics menu. I would notice that it would seem random how the "HP Wolf Security" splash screen would come up. Sometimes it would come up in text that seemed reasonably sized but other times the resolution was so low it was like a computer from the 80s. When this happened the diagnostics menu was unusable. When I moved the mouse cursor it would redraw the screen in the area I moved the mouse. It felt like using a Paint program. If I remember correctly when I first got the machine the HP Wolf security would constantly give me notifications.

[wmc]

After Win 11 shutdown my machine after the initial  installation I went to Contol Panel->Power Options-> Choose or customize a power plan where I modified  and saved a new plan called "Always On" In that  plan's settings I  set "Turn off the display" and "Put the computer to sleep" to "Never".  Then I set my "Screen Saver Settings" to "blank" and "5 Mins.  Doing this seems to have duplicated the what you did in Settings->Power->Screen, sleep & hibernate timeouts.  When I that path on my machine it shows all three set to "Never".

You  might also want to double-check the BIOS  Advanced->Power Management, ->Performance and ->Scheduled Power-on options to see it they look right.  Performance may have a setting that conflicts with Windows.

[mpmarquez]

Yesterday I installed Windows 11 on a 64GB USB 3.2 memory stick drive. By that I don't mean I installed Windows from a USB but rather that Windows is fully installed on the USB and I can boot fully into Windows from the USB drive. This was a brand new clean install of Windows 11 for Workstations. I did not install any other software other than Windows and just ran the initial setup until I got to the desktop. This I completed around 7pm yesterday. I was just going to leave it on until it rebooted or for one week, whichever came first. Today in the afternoon when I went to check it the machine was powered down. After rebooting it again from the external USB drive I went to the Events log. Apparently it had two Critical events where it rebooted/powered down. It looks like at 12:56PM today it did a reboot and then again at 1:38PM it had another power event but wasn’t able to reboot and just powered off.

I really don’t think this has anything to do with Windows. When I try to restart it I usually have to cycle the front power button several times or unplug/replug the power cord because it comes up with the “HP Wolf Security” splash screen and just hangs there and then my display’s OS reports that it is not getting any signal. I don’t know if this is a sign of anything but when this happens the “HP Wolf Security” text and logo is rendered in a very low resolution and very big. It sort of looks like graphics from an 80’s computer. If the text and logo render small and in higher definition (which I assume is normal) I don’t think it has any problem booting up.

[mpmarquez]

Thanks for the response. I made those Control Panel changes in my regular SSD Windows installation and will make them in my USB installation that I am using for testing purposes. I don't understand why Windows has two different places (Settings and Control Panel) that you need to make the changes in.

[wmc]

>>HP Wolf Security” text and logo is rendered in a very low resolution and very big.<<

That sounds like the GFX card firmware/driver is not loading when it should.  Could be that the card is either not seated well in the slot, or is flaky.  If it is faulty GFX hardware, that might lead to the machine shutting itself down to protect the PCIe bus or other motherboard parts from over-voltage/current events.