HP Envy 34-A010 stuck at POST (bios)

[MKHendrickson]

I brought this computer home , log on then went to the HP Website to get the newest bios as the internal webcam has never worked figured they might have finally fixed that. now its a giant "paperweight". I have the exact same problem as others here and your asking us to pay for support when your bios is what bricked our systems???? Honestly i want to be contacted ASAP as this is completely unacceptable. I have since tired a lot of solutions as talked about here. 

1. Try making the USB Bios tool .... this will not be recognized.

2. The acces panel on the back taking out cmos battery to restore defaults ... this does not work. (there is 4 jumpers there but you have 0 ..... 0 information on if these are jumpers to restore cmos.

3. I tore down the entire screen to get to the mother board took out the hard drive and now the system will allows me to get into the bios but still you basically made a bios update that blocks communication with the HDD ....................... :manmad:

at this point it sounds if others have had some success buy using a m2 hard drive which i do not have and should not need to purchase to continue to use this product.

simply put contact me ASAP or find a tech that can take this machine and make the correct fix. HP made the problem, HP should fix the problem.. this is simple customer service the original question was posed 9 months ago. and you have provided 0 Response. I just paid 350$ to have this shipped to my house .... basically i paid 350$ to have a 35 lb paper weight shipped ......... if you cant tell I am extremely unhappy 

Regards,

Mason

[sandytechy20]

@MKHendrickson

Thank you for posting on the HP Support Forums,

I have brought your issue to the attention of an appropriate team within HP.

They will contact you shortly and likely request information from you in order to look up your case details or product serial number.

Please look for a private message from an identified HP contact.

Additionally, keep in mind not to publicly post personal information (such as serial numbers and case details).

Regards,

[Hibb1]

Hi,

What BIOS did you update to? Was it A0.12? Was it for the correct Family SSID - 2B4C?

So when the SATA HDD is installed you get no display? Is that correct?

And when the HDD is disconnected it boots and alows you into BIOS?

It is highly unlikely that a corrupt BIOS will display those symptoms.

A corrupt BIOS on a HP PC will either have symptom s of lights/fans but no display or boot or lights/fans but the "BIOS Failed" POST beeps. I don't suppose you have another 2.5" SATA HDD you could try?

[ITPro-Kenny]

Mine didn't resolve either and since it's out of warranty HP wants me to send it to them so they can fix the issue when they're bios update is what caused it in the first place. They want to charge me for the repair cost and shipping cost which I think is unacceptable when it was there update that caused it. This is total BS. I've had this issue and no fix even removing the bios battery. This is all a waste of time. I feel like the lack of customer support and lack of engineering from hardware and software team will prevent me from ever recommending any more HP product. I would have loved it if they would fix the problem that there firmware update was the cause but instead of trying they lack customer service. My recommendation to you would either be find another motherboard or use it as a $1000 monitor kind of a waste for the money spent. Never again!!!

[AJ_envy34]

1. First I would try following this article with everything unplugged (including hard drive) and if that doesn't make any progress try it with your BIOS usb stick plugged in: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04126730
2. Don't reset CMOS unless your positive nothing else is working. I disconnected all drives (including the sata drive) from the pc and then tried booting to confirm that I wasn't even getting a (no disk detected) error when booting...which confirmed that the BIOS or related hardware was the source of the problem.  But just because I confirmed that, it didn't mean that resetting CMOS was the only way to make any progress.
3. If you reset CMOS you will have a whole bunch of other problems which you'll have to figure out how to solve on your own and are very time consuming (inputting back in all the product ID's and what not into BIOS etc), as all of the product data will be wiped when CMOS is reset.  If you are ok with this, then you can reset CMOS by pressing and holding the CMOS button for 5 seconds on the mobo.
4. Once this was done I think I was able to get into BIOS settings and turn on legacy boot, and eventually detect hard disks.

I'll say again, DON'T RESET CMOS OUT OF FRUSTRATION.  Confirm that you can't detect bootable USB sticks (i.e., your BIOS update disk), you can't reset BIOS (not CMOS) using the article above, and that you can't 'update' BIOS using the article above (with a usb stick).  

I can't be emphatic enough, make sure you have thoroughly utilized every troubleshooting option before resetting CMOS.  (Even ones that you might think of that I haven't mentioned here)

I've since sold my envy, but if you have any other questions please lmk.  

[AJ_envy34]

Also, to any HP employees that are reading this thread, you might want to have your QA or whomever people look into this, because obviously something was missed before this BIOS update was pushed out.

To the people that are having problems with the hp envy 34-a010 I feel your pain lol, feel free to contact me directly if u need help.

[MKHendrickson]

Ok well long story short,

HP is sending a replacement, as issues where brought up years ago under warantty and they promised a replacement at that point.

But to any future people, I did find some success;

ESC will load options for selection including BIOS

In Bios I have it set to legecy

Then reboot and use esc > Boot Options > USB windows

If you get to this point I have now had some success with the usb windows trying to install. It does say I need a USB driver which might be messed up since the cmos got reset or perhaps I need a diffrent Driver I could gather unsure. but to be able to get back to this point is good start. I am not going to keep investing time but I feel as if it could be fixed.

Once I formated the orginal drive and put it back in without any other HDs the orginal Sata not sure if that matters or if you should simply just have a blank drive with no other unformatted drive pluged in. But to be Safe lets say just the orginal Sata spinning HD. Formated. Then reinstall windows and you should be off and going. 

Honestly I do not know if this would be the end senario but with as much as I have tried to resucciate this PC this is the most prommising I have seen it.

HP you have released a bios on your website for this computer that will brick it. I would urge you to recreate what your customers are expereieng and build in better measures for a bios roll back as all the options "you say work" defentily do not. Computers should not be this hard, There is nothing special about this computer besides tearing it down.  Or better yet just pull the Bios Update down as it not needed for a computer that is going on 3 yrs  of age. simply chalk this up as experience , do right by the problems you have created and own it. 

Thank you for the community for offering assitance, its extermely disapointing to be in ownership of a flagship model pc and it simply be useless.

Best Regards & Good Luck,

Mason

[MKHendrickson]

Yo AJ,

I got the replacement, and tore it down stuck a WD Black 256GB Performance SSD - M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive - WDS256G1X0C into the slot. And replaced the thermal paste. Oh man the fun of tearing this machine down over and over is the best :)! But I could see in another post you were able to get your m.2 to work? I didnt do anything with the bios as I didnt want to brickthe new guy. I could see the m.2 be recognized a few times but more than not the computer will not show it in the Device Manager, sometimes it does at statup for a short time. Was going to ask how did you get yours to work? 

And in regards to the bios version it has SUP vA0.08 

7/10/2017

this is how it came and I was just trying to get the ssd boot speeds etc. so slow on the sata lol.

Few things I have learned since last post. I am unable to get in the bios on this machine by pressing esc at start up, work around holding shift and using restart from the windows shutdow/sleep/restart options will give you a prmpt go to adddintial settings, ufei boot somthing or other I can give the excat path later when I access it again. But yea pretty handy easy way to get into bios if your booting.

Secondly the tech said if I wanted to upgrade my bios unistall the m.2 > update > reinstall (basically update as the machine came) - im not doing anything with the bios atm as I am scared is will brick. 

But overall any ideas how to use the m.2 ? This machine bios update has rendered the use of SSD's incompatible as far as I can tell. 

[MKHendrickson · Accepted solution]

And lastly , I am typing this while my main OS is on the M.2 it does not play well, as you can see I had Issues but here is the soluiton that worked for me.

Go grab the windows media creation tool, download that onto a USB stick > Install Windows to the M.2 > ( This would generate errors when trying to use the system ( I find if you boot from a completly shut off position it would boot into the M.2 Drive. > success 

I am a little concerended abou taking the Orginal OS off of the computer that is on the sata so I have left it for now and simply reinstalling everything on the M.2. 

All In All system is reliable for now and seems I can go back to simply useing the computer as I would like.

[AJ_envy34]

i can't remember off hand but i think i have legacy boot on but i am using an efi install on the m.2 drive?   i think ijust tried all the differnt variations until it worked (gpt vs mbr, legacy boot on/off, etc...),  my windows boot mgr is glitchy now though, i should probably rebuild it.   i often have to press f9, to manually select the boot drive.

actually, i think i remember what i did.  bios wasn't detecting the m.2 drive, but windows on the ssd was?, so i either started the install from a usb stick i made or from windows on my old ssd and then was able to get a copy of windows installed on the drive....after that hp bios would detect the m.2

i'm sure there is a more elegant solution but i lost my patience with this pos tbh lol.    good luck 2 ya!