HP Z800 killed with KB5066835 that cause boot failure, "A Disk Read Error Occurred" if you uninstall

[SDH]

Vanadu and Akierum,

I just did a shutdown and cold boot on a Z400 loaded with 25H2 from my Rufus 4.11 thumb drive set up for MBR/Legacy BIOS installs. Followed some instincts from the past, and the boot succeeded. I'll provide added details tomorrow. I think the cause of loss of the boot loader is an odd corruption of the storage controller. If you are disconnected from the internet during the clean install the installer-provided storage controller driver works through many restarts and reboots. As soon as you reconnect to the internet and do the current updates you lose the boot loader but none of those updates are clearly driver related.

The key is while you're still disconnected from the net you need to install the storage controller drivers from HP SP65105. That gets you drivers that don't somehow get corrupted by the update process. You don't receive the RSTe drivers from a clean initial W11 25H2 install but you do get stable functionality from the drivers MS provides inside the installer USB. The SP65105 RSTe drivers that work now arethe last officially released for the ZX00 workstations. That SoftPaq does quite a bit of work during the install process (more than you'd see from the F6-floppy approach).  Below are pics of what you end up with after the full SP65105. Paul, from the past in the forum, kindly zipped a subset from the SP.... I instead ran the full SoftPaq, downloaded directly from HP.

After update with the SoftPaq...

Source from HP:

https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp65001-65500/sp65105.html

https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp65001-65500/sp65105.exe

[SDH]

One step forward and 2 back. After I got that working a new security update showed up spontaneously and broke it again. I'm onto something but truly this is getting old. I'll try again tomorrow with a later Intel RSTe installer that covers both the ZX00 and the ZX20 workstations.

[SDH]

Akierum, the originator of this valuable post, added a direct reply which shows up on the bottom of Page 1... you have to go back to see it.

Huge thanks to him for that, and it clarifies the issue. For me that means I'll probably need to go back to installing W11 24H2 on these ZX00 workstations and hope that killer update does not do the same to those installs also.  Or, hope Microsoft fixes this mess. I won't hold my breath... these are highly officially unsupported pieces of hardware.

EDIT 1: Nah... that won't work. Microsoft Update Catalog shows same update for 24H2 and 25H2.

EDIT 2: Added information on my project... I don't use RAID and was doing my testing on a spare Z400 we had on the shelf. I found that I had to do DiskPart Clean and convert MBR commands on the SATA SSD after each failure to get the drive back to something that the Rufus 4.11 installer USB could recognize.

I also might be able to block that updater from installing. 

[vanadu]

Yes, it's beyond old. It was old two days ago. Yesterday I finished restoring W10 from my backup using Macrium, using the Macrium-created USB to fix the boot record and set it to the system partition. It worked, but as expected, it borked my Grub bootloader, so the machine booted straight to W10...and updated itself with some KB5066747 and KB50719549. I didn't have a good feeling about that. To get to Ubuntu, I downloaded Super Grub 2 to a USB with Rufus and was able to boot into Ubuntu.

https://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/

But the next time I tried to boot into W10, it didn't see the boot drive at all. It went straight to looking on the network for an OS, which is the next option in the BIOS boot sequence. I tried to fix the boot record again with the Macrium USB... no dice. Disk manager now shows the System Reserved partition as System, Active, Primary) and the C:Windows as Boot, Page File, Crash Dump and Primary. I'm not sure if that's the way it's supposed to be.

I ended up using Super Grub 2 to boot into Windows, and it worked. So now I have no way to boot directly out of bios to the OS -- I have to boot to the Super Grub 2 USB and select and OS from there. And to be honest, I'm thankful that works otherwise I'd be screwed. 

SDM, there are so many moving parts here I can't even begin to comprehend it. But obviously Super Grub 2 knows something that the Windows bootloader doesn't know. That might help get a handle on it, maybe.

[SDH]

I feel your pain...

It looks like time to retire the Z600 favorite heritage workstation on my loft desk. Too much risk given these developments. I'm not seeing any issues with our Z440/Z640 workstations which have been successfully Rufus'd up to 25H2 here, but they don't have anywhere near the nice patina that Z600 does...

EDIT: Our Z440/Z640 and our Z420/Z620 which are upgraded to W11 25H2 are not suffering from this issue... and those were built using the Rufus GPT/UEFI method I describe later in this post.

😊

[vanadu]

Well, yes, more pain now, a lot more. Turns out that by the time Super Grub 2 runs, the RAID driver load has already failed, so Windows starts without the Raid array. 

SDH, please don't bail on the Zx00s yet...there must be a solution somewhere. 

[vanadu]

Akierum -- huge thanks for this. Never would have occurred to me to hit ChatGPT for this. I'm not a big fan of AI but, well, I could have googled myself silly for days and still not found it. 

[vanadu]

So now W10 is booting again, even though it failed last time and I didn't change anything. The dates on iastorv.sys and iastorv.inf are 2019, so it looks like they didn't get overwritten in KB5066747or KB50719549 from this morning, and the killer update KB5066835 wasn't listed in the update log. So maybe...just maybe they figured it out there in Redmond and have nixxed KB5066835 and stopped replacing the RST drivers.

I still don't have my Grub bootloader but can boot Ubuntu from Super Grub 2. That will have to do for the time being. 

 

[SDH]

I wish... tried again using all my best methods and even though KB5066835 was not in this most recent probe of Window Update after clean 25H2 install the boot into the SSD failed again. I used the WUHideShow MS utility to probe for updates right after reconnecting to the internet and it saw all the available updates. I let all come and paid the price. 

[vanadu]

OK. I'm going to keep plugging at this for a while based on @Akierum's great info...have no choice since this Z600 is my main squeeze.  Worst case I'll have to move to a refurb Z640 and waste two weeks tweaking it to my needs. But IMO MS plans to send those to the scrap heap within a couple years, too.