Z840 workstation not able to access bios or boot

[MtnBeach77]

Howdy,

Weird problems with a Z840 workstation... 

1) Can't access bios, even with HP PS2 keyboard.  Constantly hitting ESC or F10 does nothing.  Tried other keyboards... same.

2) Blank screen on boot until LSI ROM screen comes up.  I can access LSI set-up, so know both keyboard and monitor is working.  BUT, goes straight to PXE boot menu, even with bootable media in DVD or USB drives.

3) Boot disk is an M.2 PCI card.... but getting to it seems to be the least of my problems.

4) Reset CMOS and settings (removed power, battery, CMOS reset button), rebooted, but didn't get clock error message from bios nor a system menu or "can't find boot drive" error message.  DO NOT have any BIOS errors or beeps, power button is solid white, so don't suspect CMOS is damaged and it seems to pass POST to get to LSI ROMs.

Not sure how I got into this mess, but really surprised there seems to be no way to get into BIOS to check on secure boot enabled (which could be preventing booting from USB) and to do other things like run a hardware check and/or boot from USB.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Best. -Ron

[SDH]

Ron, You've done everything I would do too. My guess is that you have a piece of hardware installed that is causing this. I'd remove everything I could and try again. Another trick I came across recently is this: 

1. Power fully off

2. Push power-on button

3. Immediately start pressing Esc at a rate of 2 presses per second, and keep going longer than you would think is necessary. Don't slow down and don't stop until it clearly is futile. You can see if there is a flash of hope on the monitor and if you get in set BIOS to factory defaults plus add a delay of 5 seconds during boot. Save on the way out of BIOS and see if that works.

4. Probably unrelated but I always turn off Fast Startup from the Power app in Control Panel. It is not "fast" and caused us a world of hurt for a while preventing calibration software for our medical monitors from working under W10 and W11.

If starting with Esc does not work then try F10 instead, again from full power off to start with.

If that does not work, then try F9 same way instead.

I "broke into" a workstation with stuck BIOS recently this way with almost two full minutes of pressing, and somehow adding the 5 second delay seemed to help on subsequent BIOS access.

Also, if a boot option is F5-disabled you won't be able to boot from a USB or optical disk even if the inserted media has bootable capabilities. Makes sense for security. Did that Z840 come recycled from a source that might have only allowed PXE as its single boot option?

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

power off, remove power cord, press power button till beeping/lpwr light is off

open side cover remove cmos batt then locate cmos reset button by batt and press for 10 sec reinstall batt side cover power cord and power on while tapping F10 key rapidly note that PS2 keyboard is preferred over usb

 the bios for the video default rom setting might be set for EFI instead of Legacy

this results in a blank or non responsive screen during boot till windows loads

the issue may be as simple as the boot order in the bios settings (order is from top down)

also, you want to select windows boot manager or the actual device name

the z840 can select either UEFI or Legacy boot read the below

the modes are not switchable you determine which mode during the OS install

any changes afterword's will result in a boot error

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_3891464-2337914-16

[MtnBeach77]

Thanks for the response.  yeah it was the AMD video card. Had an Nvidia card in as well but removed it, which caused the bios to not be displayed.  The PS2 keyboard was also worse then plain ole USB for access and moving around;.  Got the bios updated to 2.62.  Now if I can only get TPM 2.0 installed... another post.  Thanks!