HP Z620 does not boot with >4TB HDD installed

[augustin-z]

Hi everyone, I am running into a problem on boot with my HP Z620. 

When I have hard drives larger than 4TB installed I cannot get beyond the HP logo screen, ie the system will not POST. Hitting F9 or F10 will show the messages "entering boot menu" or "entering setup" respectively but I cannot go beyond this.

If the drives are installed once I have reached the boot menu or hot-swapped once I am in the OS everything is functional. All of my data is there and a SMART test returns no problems. I have had no issues with any of my other HDDs or SSDs (all <4TB)  in various formats - ExFAT, NTFS, HFS+ ...

This issue also only arises when the drives are formatted. When they are uninitialised I am able to get to the boot menu/BIOS with no problem. The BIOS also is able to recognise that they are connected and have a certain size. I have tried plugging the drives into every SATA port on the motherboard with the same problem.

Has anybody else come across this issue?

Is there a maximum HDD or Volume size that the BIOS can handle?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Augustin

Specs

HP Z620, boot block 2011

CPU - 2x Xeon e5-2690

RAM - 8x 4GB PC3 12800R

BIOS rev 3.92 (most current as of writing)

Running Windows 10n and OSX 10.12.6 (probably not important as problem arises before reaching either OS)

[DGroves]

are you formating them as "GPT" and does the bios have UEFI mode enabled?

both are nessary to have a 4TB drive formated with one partition and also be bootable

you might want to read up on the requirements/limitations relating to this:

https://www.disk-partition.com/articles/partition-4tb-hard-drive-4125.html

[augustin-z]

The drives are purely for storage and formatted as GPT. I believe I have UEFI mode enabled - under Advanced/Device Options/Mass Storage Option ROMS I have set it as EFI. PXE Option ROMS and Video Option ROMS are also set as EFI.

Do Legacy boot options need to be disabled under Storage/Boot Order? These are currently still enabled.

Are there any other settings I have missed?

Thanks for your help,

Augustin

[DGroves]

Leave legacy rom support enabled, if disabled many cards will no longer work, also unless your video card says it has uefi support it will not work (you might want to set this back to legacy) also setting it to uefi can cause some boottime screens to not be available on some of the video outputs of the video card

when preping the main os drive, remove/disconnect all other drives. reconnect them once the OS has been installed

[augustin-z]

When I originally prepped the main OS drives, they were the only ones in the system. Adding the extra storage drive causes the system to fail to POST. Removing all drives apart from the storage drive also results in the same problem

I have tried the drives in various other (newer) systems and have not been able to reproduce this problem.

How do I make sure I have UEFI mode enabled in the BIOS? Other than the settings in /Advanced/Device Options/ I havent found anything that I need to change to enable UEFI mode.

[DGroves]

enter the bios and select reset to factory defaults, save then power off

now remove all drives except fo the drive that will become the boot/c drive

in windows 10 setup at the drive selection screen, select any found partiotions and remove/delete them

(you want a clean install, that generates new partion/UEFI information to the drive)

now install windows 10, when done with the install  boot into windows confirm the OS install  created the win 10 partitions right (you should see 3 partitions ) if so power off connect the data drive, and from win 10 "Disk Managment"

select the data drive and remove any existing partition information, close dsk mgmt, and reboot

(note that remove all info means the partitions and the drive init info, the drive  needs to say unallocated)

now from disk managment, create a single partition in GPT format on the data drive

last please explane in detail  when the system refuses to post

do you men by this that the computer will not power on? refuse to display a post screen or give some other error

[augustin-z]

Thank you for your suggestion, I will try a fresh install and clean wipe of the drive when I have the time to do so. I have already tried deleting all of the partition information, both in windows and in Linux (with wipefs command), this solved my problem until the drive was formatted again with a fresh GPT and ExFAT partition.

I would prefer not to perform a fresh install if I don't have to - I don't think the problem lies with the operating system as I have the same problem even if no bootable drives are installed. With the same drives installed in my H170 based system I have no trouble booting into Windows or Linux

With the storage drive installed I am able to get to the HP logo screen (attached picture), but no further. I cannot enter the startup menu, diagnostics, boot menu or BIOS. I have waited for ~30 minutes and nothing changed.

This indicates that the issue is with the BIOS - it happens long before I get into Windows. If I plug the drive in once I am inside Windows everything works perfectly and I am able to access all of my data. While this is a workaround for my problem, it is not a solution.