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- HP Community
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- Desktop Boot and Lockup
- HP Z2 Tower G9 Workstation boot lockup

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02-16-2023 08:26 AM
I have a peculiar problem with a brand-new HP Z2 Tower G9 Workstation, part number 6H926UT#ABA. This features an Intel i9-12900K processor, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I installed an NVIDIA T1000 8GB graphics card, an Intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E M.2 2230 Wireless Network Adapter Card (this was recommended by an Expert on this Community as working well on this machine), and finally a Seagate 6TB Exos 7E10 HDD.
I am a retired IT professional that has a hobby of “collecting” Linux distributions. I worked for a long time on large IBM AIX database servers running AIX and have a fondness for UNIX, so Linux was a perfect fit for me. I have a vintage 2011 HP Compaq 6200 Pro SFF PC with an ancient Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, an NVIDIA NVS510 graphics card and a 6TB Seagate HDD. It has a combined EFI / traditional boot BIOS. This machine is a rugged workhorse that has worked reliably for all these years. I have 14 different Linux distributions installed, each with its own EFI boot entry. Recently, I’ve been looking to upgrade for better performance and more recent hardware, and having has such a good experience with HP desktops, I purchased the new Z2 G9 Workstation.
The new Z2 G9 appeared to work perfectly. I superficially configured Windows 10 22H2 just enough for it to work properly since I have no real plans to use it regularly. I installed drivers for the NVIDIA T1000 and the Intel AX210 and everything was running smoothly. I then started to partition my 6TB Seagate HDD using a Live Linux boot drive and prepared to migrate my Linux systems for migration from the HP 6200 Pro to the Z2 G9 Workstation. I want to stress that the new Workstation was functioning perfectly, with all the hardware working successfully under Linux including the NVIDIA card and the Intel WLAN.
I successfully migrated Fedora 37, Linux Mint 21.1, Ubuntu 22.10, Debian 11 “bullseye”, Arch Linux, Mageia 8 and openSUSE Tumbleweed. All were working perfectly, with the latest NVIDIA drivers for the T1000 and the Intel AX210 WLAN successfully connecting to my W-Fi router. Every Linux booted with its own EFI entry in the Boot Menu along with Windows 10 secure on its own SSD. I had two more Linux distributions to deal with, Rocky Linux 8.7 and AlmaLinux 8.7, which are clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Instead of migrating those, I chose to install the newer version 9.1 for each. The installation of Rocky Linux 9.1 worked perfectly but things took an unexpected turn when I installed AlmaLinux 9.1. Since Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are clones of each other the installation was virtually identical.
The problem started when I tried to reboot the Workstation after the installation was completed. Pressing the F9 key for the Boot Menu, the “Entering Boot Menu” message was displayed at the bottom of the screen as usual, but no boot menu appeared; instead the machine just shut itself down after about three seconds and then restarted itself, only to restart the same cycle when I tried to access the Boot Menu. Pressing F10 instead for the Setup Menu did not work either; the “Entering Setup Menu” message was displayed but no Setup Menu, only the same shutting down and restarting. When the machine is started and no keys are pressed, it only shuts down and restarts itself endlessly. It looks like the firmware is somehow damaged. I’m at a loss on understanding how installing a Linux distribution could possibly damage the boot process. Are over ten EFI boot entries too many for the boot menu to handle? What could have happened that a nearly identical Linux installed successfully just before that last one locked up the machine?
I’m sorry for such a long post, but I thought that detailed information was essential for establishing the context for what happened. I’m fairly sure that I can exchange the Workstation it need be, but I would prefer trying to understand how a PC can have its boot process lock up like that and work out a solution.
Many thanks in advance.