Best way to correct AIO boot issues?

[ruodwinns]

My friend purchased a Pavilion AIO machine to work from home. She's required to use a USB boot drive with hardware encryption (in this case a Spyrus Secure Workspace drive) to access the office domain, so she asked me to walk her through how to use it. The machine started out working as expected. We shut it down, inserted the USB drive, and booted to it with no problem. However, when we were finished and had shut the system down again and removed the Spyrus drive, the computer would no longer boot from the internal hard disk. At first there was the typical "Error 3F0 - no OS boot manager found" type error, but that eventually changed and now it only lights up the screen for a moment before shutting off again, and repeats this loop indefinitely.

• Esc and F-keys do allow access to the BIOS functions.
• Hardware diagnostics reports all components are working normally, no problem was found in the HDD test.
• Ensured system was on latest applicable BIOS version (84EE - release F10).
• Reset BIOS to default settings.
• Tried booting to USB recovery media (various partition manager software, Windows 7 install media, tried both from DVD and flash), this was unsuccessful.
• The built-in recovery menu (F11 during POST) loads fine, but all of the options just loop back to this same menu, either after the screen flashes for a moment, or after a reboot.

I'll get her in touch with HP's support next week if needed, but as it's the weekend I thought I'd see if anyone can help me figure this out.

I'm not that familiar with systems using UEFI and Secure Boot, so some of the above behaviour might be expected - please feel free to educate me. My first thought was that the boot record/partition was damaged (though this seems unlikely since the IronKey isolates the user and system from any non-removable storage devices). That should normally be a fairly quick fix, but I couldn't get the machine to successfully boot to anything. I hesitate to open the system up without reading the warranty terms, so for now swapping the drive to a working machine is out. No Windows 10 media was available on hand, so I guess that's what I'll attempt next.

[Echo_Lake]

@ruodwinns
Thank you for posting on the HP Support Community.  

I appreciate your efforts to try and resolve the issue. As you've performed all the relevant troubleshooting steps including hard drive test and the issue persists, it sounds like a corrupted operating system partition on the hard drive causing the hassle. Hence the computer needs to be serviced. 

HP Support can be reached by clicking on the following link:

• Click on this link – http://www.hp.com/contacthp/
• Select the product type.
• Enter the serial number of your device or select let HP detect your product option.
• Select the country from the drop-down.
• You should see the HP support number or Chat option listed

Please feel free to contact us here anytime you need any further assistance. 

Please click “Accept as Solution” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.

[ruodwinns · Accepted solution]

Closing out the thread with what was learned:

• The problem was that booting to the Spyrus device breaks the pairing between the AIO's mechanical disk drive and the Optane cache drive, preventing the system from booting completely. It is not known whether an update to the software or firmware of the involved devices would prevent this, but at this point it time it required reinstalling the OS. I did this once leaving Optane caching enabled, and confirmed that the problem reoccurred as soon as the system was booted to the USB device again. Subsequently the Optane drive was formatted as a standard disk, and used to store the Windows page file instead. Evidently this results in a reduction in speed but there is little alternative.
• As for the AIO machine itself, I do not know why it was having such a difficult time at the POST stages. Many combinations of UEFI/Legacy boot settings were tried, but nearly all of them resulted in failure. The boot media, both flash drives and optical discs, worked on other systems, but it either would not show as an option in the AIO's Boot Menu (when I could even get that to load), or the software would hang while starting up. Eventually Windows 10 was burned to a DVD and for some reason this allowed the reinstallation to proceed.