Boot device not found

[Sm6ke]

My hard drives are fine. I go to start up and press F11 repeatedly but no trouble shooting pages come on. It's just the red messy box which when u press enter it goes blue. I've followed all the steps online but nothing resolves the problem. Any help would be much appreciated

[Grzwacz]

Greetings,

Welcome to the forum.

I am not a HP employee.

Please provide a specific HP Product number.

A boot device error at system startup may mean your hard disk drives are not fine.

Run HP Diagnostics (Link).

Tap "ESC" at boot.

Select "F2".

Run System Tests.

Regards

[Hibb1]

Hi,

So HDD's pass diags if you think they're fine?
I don't recall any red boxes with HP units. F11 will only work if you have an intact HP Recovery partition. If you have wiped all partitions at some stage and installed vanilla Win10 then F11 won't do anything.

What happens if you let the machine try to boot? What messages are you getting?

[Sm6ke]

I've followed all the steps online but nothing seems to work. I don't recall getting rid of hp recovery.

[Hibb1]

Oh yeah... *THAT* red screen... Haven't seen that for a few years.. Last time I saw it I needed to replace the HDD to get rid of it.

Can you go into BIOS (F10) and check the Legacy and Secure Boot options. Is one enabled and the other disabled?

Try switching them around and see what happens. Also try loading setup defaults and see what happens there too.

Worse case scenario, you can probably load vanilla Windows 10 Home on it. You already have a digital license, so don't need another key. You'll just need to download the installation media from the microsoft site.

Let me know how you go

[Sm6ke]

Thanks will do 

[Sm6ke]

I have managed to do the vanilla 7 thing but when I try to do system restore or uninstall updates nothing seems to work. I've also tried installing windows 10 again but that doesn't work ether. I wondered if I needed some sort of command prompt. Ps thanks for your help 

[Hibb1 · Accepted solution]

Did you install WIndows 10 over the top? If windows didn't see any previous OS on the drive, then there will be nothing to restore to, so no, restore won't do anthing. I *think* you've probably started from scratch.

When you (re)installed Windows, was any of your data there? Or was it like new?

Once Windows is installed, I would suggest running WIndows Update 1st, the downloading and installing the HP Support Assistant and HP UEFI Diags. Run the support assistant and check for updates. Then maybe run the UEFI diags on an extensive test overnight (Keep tapping F2 when you turn the unit on)

[Sm6ke]

Sorry not responded for a while. At the minute I can't seem to get past the installing windows phase and going through every thing in the trouble shooting menu. If any thing works I'll let u know. Ps ones again thanks for your help

[Sm6ke]

An error message I get when trying to install is "windows could not prepare the computer to boot into the next phase of installation. To install windows,restart the installation." Not shore what to do from here.