HP Z8-G5 Weird Startup and PCIe SATA Contoller Incompatibility

[wmc]

QUESTIONS:

1. Is there a way to have an HP Z8-G5 start up in less than 3.5 minutes?
2. Is there a way to make an HP Z8-G5 operate a PCIe SATA/eSATA controller card with one eSATA device attached? (NOTE: eSATA card and device worked perfectly on Windows 10 HP Z840 until the day they were moved to the Windows 11 Z8-G5.)

HP Z8-G5 cold start takes over 3 minutes to get to the Windows 11 login screen.

              Time (mm:ss)                   Event

              00:00                   Press Z8-G5 power button

                                           Monitor from standby to on but signal is black screen

              00:45                   Z8-G5 powers down for about 2 secs then powers back up

                                           Monitor still on but signal is still just black screen

              01:40                   HP-Wolf screen appears

              02:42                   HP-Wolf rotating anim appears below HP-Wolf logo

              03:20                   Windows start sound and Windows lock/logins screen appears.

And this is from an SSD with “Fast Start” enabled. (Restart from Windows 11 follows similar timeline but slightly longer to complete.)

The momentary power-down/up at 00:45 leaves no trace in the Event Viewer, BIOS Event Log, any dump files etc. so I can only conclude this is the part of HP- Sure/Wolf stuff I could not remove from BIOS.  (I had to uninstall everything that was “HP Sure…” or “Wolf …” from “Control Panel -> Programs and Features” because those applications / modules,  over the first few days after a clean OS install from HP’s OEM Windows 11 installer, appeared to “learn” my “habits” and “assist” me with increasing frequency by blocking simple actions like file copy/move, selecting a .pdf file to read/edit, and prevent error free execution of some up-to-date non-Microsoft, non-HP applications.

“Odd” (to me) “Event Viewer->Windows Logs->System” events during bootup include those with source “Hyper-V-Hypervisor” as I DO NOT have any Hyper-V items checked in “Control Panel->Programs and Features->Turn Windows features on and off”.  I always see error event ID 6008 “The previous system shutdown at <hh:mm:ss> xM on <m/dd/yyy‎y> was unexpected” where the time and date reflect the last shutdown I initiated from Windows 11.  IOW, there was nothing unexpected about it.  Perhaps corresponding is the ”Critical” Kernal-Power  event 41, “The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly” which is only true if it is referring to the momentary power-down/up at roughly the 45 second mark of the startup sequence.  I always see the apparently un-fixable error event ID 7000 “The l1vhlwf service failed to start due to the following error: A hypervisor feature is not available to the user” for a Windows feature (Hyper-V) I appear to have turned off.  The System events up until logon appear to cover only 40 seconds of the process. So what is going on for the other 2.5 – 3 minutes?

PCIe SATA/eSATA Controller Issue

Even with all the HP-/Wolf crap uninstalled the Z8-G5 will not allow a StarTech PCIe SATA/eSATA card to be used in this system.  I do not know if it is HP or Windows 11 or a conspiracy of the two, but it seems they have, without warning, EOL’ed PCIe SATA controller support.   Virtually every supplier of such PCIe SATA cards uses Asmedia ASM106x chips, and since the operational blocks seem to be at the firmware level there are no eSATA/SATA cards that will actually function in a Z8-G5 PCIe slot – I’ve tried all the slots left empty after HP’s provisioning of the “customize and buy” system.

With the card installed Device Manager recognizes it as a ‘Standard SATA ACHI Controller’, functioning properly using the Microsoft driver.  “Update Driver” leads to “You are using the best driver...” message, so Windows 11 seems happy with it.  But connect a device to the eSATA port and you will crash the system. NOTE: this is using the same PCIe SATA/eSATA card and device that ran happily on a Windows 10 Z840 for YEARS right up until I moved them to the brand new Z8-G5 with a clean HP OEM Windows 11 install.

Debugging is not really possible because with the card in place and an eSATA device attached to the card and powered on, the system hangs during boot either on the HP-Wolf logo screen or on a BSOD “MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION”.  Despite the “we will restart for you” on the BSOD, neither presentation does restart.  Instead, over a period of about a minute, every fan in the box slowly speeds up to maximum so it sounds like a jetliner attempting a short-field takeoff.  If the system has booted to Windows before the external eSATA device is powered up, and then you turn it on, in about 30 seconds the machine goes to either the HP-Wolf screen or BSOD and hangs the same as mentioned above.  As far as I can tell, the BSOD appears if the card is inserted in a PCIe slot serviced by CPU0, and the hang in the HP-Wolf screen if it is in a slot serviced by CPU1.

These hangs/BSODs DO NOT leave any trace in Windows Event Viewer System, Setup, or Security logs, or any dump files that I can find.  However, if I look in the Event Viewer’s “Windows Logs -> Application” or in the MANY “Applications and Service Logs” I start finding all kinds of things around the time of the failure that happens when you power-up the eSATA device after the system is fully booted into Windows 11.  Whether those events are relevant to the failure or not I can’t tell, but they don’t seem to happen or repeat at other times.

When searching for a solution I noticed that almost all the reports of incompatibility of PCIe SATA/eSATA controllers were on HP hardware when attempting to install the card into an existing late-Windows 10 or Windows 11 system.  There were a smattering of ASUS/ROG systems but they seemed to be able to address the issue with a BIOS “hybrid UEFI / legacy” or “CSM” switch (which of course does not appear in the Z8-G5 BIOS.

The eSATA device is an external hardware RAID5 that I use for file history, and online system and data backups.  Through eSATA a full backup and verify takes between 3 – 4 hours.  Using USB with the same device the backup takes about 28 hours and the verify about 48 hours.  I CANNOT have backups taking that long.

I also find LOADS of repeating errors that are never raised to the user’s attention or appear in the main “Windows Logs” and the vast majority involve some HP “feature”.  EX. “Applications and Service Logs->Microsoft->Windows->WMI-Activity->Operational” is loaded with:

Log Name:      Microsoft-Windows-WMI-Activity/Operational

Source:        Microsoft-Windows-WMI-Activity

Date:          2/5/2025 3:25:56 PM

Event ID:      5858

Task Category: None

Level:         Error

Keywords:     

User:          SYSTEM

Computer:      <COMPUTER NAME>

Description:

Id = {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}; ClientMachine = TIGER; User = NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM; ClientProcessId = 4888; Component = Unknown; Operation = Start IWbemServices::CreateInstanceEnum - root\wmi : hpqBIntM; ResultCode = 0x80041032; PossibleCause = Throttling Idle Tasks, refer to CIMOM regkey: ArbTaskMaxIdle

Event Xml:

<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">

  <System>

    <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-WMI-Activity" Guid="{1418ef04-b0b4-4623-bf7e-d74ab47bbdaa}" />

    <EventID>5858</EventID>

    <Version>0</Version>

    <Level>2</Level>

    <Task>0</Task>

    <Opcode>0</Opcode>

    <Keywords>0x4000000000000000</Keywords>

    <TimeCreated SystemTime="2025-02-05T23:25:56.9458609Z" />

    <EventRecordID>44303</EventRecordID>

    <Correlation />

    <Execution ProcessID="4676" ThreadID="11464" />

    <Channel>Microsoft-Windows-WMI-Activity/Operational</Channel>

    <Computer>TIGER</Computer>

    <Security UserID="S-1-5-18" />

  </System>

  <UserData>

    <Operation_ClientFailure xmlns="http://manifests.microsoft.com/win/2006/windows/WMI">

      <Id>{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}</Id>

      <ClientMachine>TIGER</ClientMachine>

      <User>NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM</User>

      <ClientProcessId>4888</ClientProcessId>

      <Component>Unknown</Component>

      <Operation>Start IWbemServices::CreateInstanceEnum - root\wmi : hpqBIntM</Operation>

      <ResultCode>0x80041032</ResultCode>

      <PossibleCause>Throttling Idle Tasks, refer to CIMOM regkey: ArbTaskMaxIdle</PossibleCause>

    </Operation_ClientFailure>

  </UserData>

</Event>

Paired with another Event ID 5858 with very similar description repeated about every 5 minutes. The process ID (4888) mentioned in both errors points to hpsvcsscan.exe.  And there are myriad other such entries in these logs for events that repeat as rapidly as 30 times per second.

It appears that there is some connection between HP BIOS and Windows 11 “enhanced security features” from the latest TPM revisions that produce most of the errors and warnings found in these logs.  It leads me to feel that it is the excessive burden of add-on security stuff that is preventing the use of the StarTech PEXESAT322I PCIe eSATA/SATA controller.

Any ideas?