HP Z2 G8 workstations with Win 11 24

[admin_koup]

Hello community,

I have 5 HP Z2 G8 workstations and a problem with Windows 11 24H2. Currently, all 5 workstations have Win 10 22H2, working fine.
I did an in-place upgrade to Win 11 which worked until the first reboot. All 5 systems can't reboot or shutdown. Fans still spinning and devices never shut down. I have to press the power button for 4 seconds to power off the device, wait about 5 seconds and then can turn on the device again. Win 11 is working then but still no reboot or shutdown

Things I tried:
1) Updated all drivers and firmware, including latest BIOS update
2) Reset BIOS to Factory defaults
3) Tried with one device: Setup clean Windows 11 24H2 with an USB stick and even there during the OS installation rebooting the device isn't possible

I have older workstations with Win 11 24H2 without this problem.

All 5 workstations have certified Nvidia graphic cards.

Any ideas what to try next?

[SDH]

You mention having your Z2 G8 workstations running fine on W10... I assume those came from HP with W10Pro64 licenses, and thus they will be licensed also for W11. However, I have found that an in-place upgrade from W10 to W11 does not automatically upgrade all of your system drivers to the latest HP-selected W11 versions. This could be your problem. A clean W11 install will generally not have that same issue... but newer drivers that come from MS are not necessarily what HP would have selected. See below... I have seen sequential in-place OS updating from W7 to W10 to W11 drag along some quite old drivers. HP and MS do surely work together on the choices offered through Windows Update and in the downloadable MS .iso files for the latest OS versions, but the drivers are not always identical.

Are you aware there is a latest BIOS version for your workstations, released December 2024? I only do BIOS updates from within BIOS and I do a lot of them for our enterprise HP workstations. Never have had an issue doing it that way. Have borked one HP workstation doing a BIOS update from within the functioning OS and luckily was able to do a crisis recovery and saved that. Never again... I've posted on how to do harvest the new BIOS .bin file and target that for the update from within BIOS here in the past. That has been built into workstation BIOS forever but the method changed some in the big upgrade in BIOS type from the ZX20 and before era to the ZX40 and beyond era. If you can't find that info here let me know.

Third, do you know about the HP Cloud Recovery system? Your Z2 G8 systems should have a HP-built gold standard downloadable recovery W11 installer that includes exactly the drivers the HP engineers hand-selected for the Z2 G8 hardware. These can be different from what MS provides you via their W11 clean installer downloads. That HP installer will work on your HP hardware assuming it was originally W10/W11 licensed by HP. 

So, I'd update your BIOS first, download the HP W11 Cloud Recovery installer for your workstation, reset BIOS to factory defaults again to be sure (save on the way out of BIOS), run the HP Cloud Recovery installer for the latest W11 version that comes with that (which likely will be from before 24H2), and then use Windows Update to upgrade that to 24H2. 

Assuming the 5 are identical you could then capture an image from the first and clone that over to the other 4... assuming they are all W10/W11 licensed via your HP purchase that clone will work on all. I use Acronis for that... 

A tip: Since your W10 builds will all be registered on the combined MS W10/W11 Activation servers the clones made from the first will work on all the other 4 even if several of those were originally bought from HP as Linux builds and later you bought W10 licenses for those.  All then will have a MS W10/W11 digital license that on first connect to the internet will be automatically activated. The Cloud Recovery installer by itself, however, would not work on those Linux ones to make the initial image... it checks the on-motherboard HP firmware codes before working. Stay legal.

EDIT: I see BeemerBiker's post. Agree. Especially turning off Fast Startup. It caused us many issues, and I turn that off in all of my installs. Plus, it is not even noticeably "fast".

[BeemerBiker]

Sorry, but it looks like you will need to diagnose the problem. I assume you installed the Dec 2024 BIOS update.

Bring up the windows event viewer and look in both systems and applications for anything suspicious such as "process xxxx vetoes shutdown ..."

Any timeouts from processes "phoning home"

Run the energy report and sleep study discussed here.  it is useful on workstations, not just laptops.  Look at error messages.

Tio run them, reference this document

Some suggestions by Microsoft include

disabling fast startup and modern standby

Please ask Microsoft CoPilot how to do those

[admin_koup]

@SDH:

Thank you for your reply! We use HP workstations for a few years now, never had an issue like this before (going back to Win7/8/10/11). I'm not on this site and updated BIOS before via OS, probably a little bit risky but worked ;-). And yes, I'm currently using the 01.06.10 BIOS.

I never used Cloud Recovery System before, if it has to happen, I set up a clean OS and then install drivers with a HP tool, currently I'm using HPIA for that. I never install drivers via Windows update, there were issues in the past.

I'll reply to the next answer with more information.

[admin_koup]

@BeemerBiker:

Yes, BIOS is 01.06.10 on all devices.

Testing: This is a little bit complicated because these devices are all in use and there is no spare device which I can use for testing. So I have to do this during the weekend. And if it is not working I have to revert to Win 10 which means a lot of manual work because there is no automation in place for installing the CAD software.

I'll again check the event logs, did this last time, but maybe there was something there which I overlooked.

Fast Startup is disabled on all devices, but I'll check modern standby and the energy report next time.

Please be patient, I'll collect all suggestions and then work on it on 2025-01-11 and report back.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[BeemerBiker]

From Google "AI"

To go back to Windows 10 after upgrading to Windows 11, you can use the "Go Back" option in your system settings within 10 days of the upgrade; after that period, you will need to perform a clean install of Windows 10, which means backing up your data and reinstalling the operating system from scratch

[admin_koup]

Yes, I used this option for 4 out of the 5 devices and it worked

[SDH]

There is a good recent post regarding HP Cloud Recovery HERE . Some updated links and info are in there. You'll need your product ID and serial number from one of your HP-Windows-licenced workstations... a Windows icon sticker will be on the rear backplane of the case down near the bottom, and the Windows licensing vs Linux status usually is stated in tiny letters on one of the case bottom labels.

What is your form factor? Tower or SFF?   What processors are you using... all the same?

You sound like you're running a production shop. I'd recommend that you learn how to make an image of your install which you can clone from. For us it takes roughly 20 minutes to capture an install image using an external-attached USB3 backup drive, and about the same to clone from the image back to an internal 2.5" SATA SSD. If the SSD is a NVMe M.2 drive it is even faster. Risk of downtime and waste of your time would make that quite worthwhile.

We've been using Acronis for capturing images and cloning from those backups for years now because we build our imaging workstations from near identical parts.  I only have to create one gold standard build when we have a generational upgrade, image it, and if a workstation somehow gets corrupted later it costs us about 20 minutes to get that station up and running again.

[MikeDenys2]

Same problem here with 4 computers Z2G8 's running 24H2 (win11)
They don't turn down since a recent windows update.
Hard shutdown and start button is the only solution to get it running again.
Is there a solution ?
These are daily (remote) used computers that we can't just reinstall and test a little bit.

[admin_koup]

I'm still waiting for a new workstation to arrive because then I have one spare and can do more tests without interrupting users. The next things I'll try is to install Win 11 24H2 without the NVIDIA graphic card and if the problem persists I'll try 23H2.