Unable to boot - Hard Disk Error (3F4) on a drive that doesn't exist

[kgambill]

I'm unable to get my desktop to boot up properly about 90% of the time. It just sits on the black screen with the HP logo and the spinning dots forever.

During bootup, I see the following error

The strange thing is I only have two drives on my machine - one SSD and one HDD. My SSD has Windows and all of my applications, while my HDD has data files for an x64 program I'm currently developing. These should be drives 0 and 1 ( or 1 and 2 not sure if the error codes are 0 based ). So I have no idea what Hard Disk 4 is referring to.

I've run every diagnostic test available from the boot menu and everything passes without issue. However once I exit the boot menu it stays hung on the HP loading screen as described above. Every once in a while it will boot up properly, and I have zero issues ( no data loss, no hangs, no disk detection issues ) returning from sleep mode, but whenever I have to restart or cold boot I get right back into this loop of being unable to boot without trying 100 times.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated. Since there is no Hard Drive 4 I have no idea where to look. I thought maybe it was a motherboard issue or something but it seems strange that there are no other issues whatsoever with the machine, and I would expect to have many more issues if my motherboard were failing.

[Grzwacz]

Greetings,

Welcome to the forum.

I am not a HP employee.

I can't look at your PC's specs using Envy 570. You should have, per your post, two storage devices and a optical drive.

Check SATA data connections on the motherboard to isolate disk 4. HP starts drive delineation at port "0". Maybe you have a drive connected to SATA port 4?? Try a different lower numbered SATA port.

You have an intermittent problem; very hard to troubleshoot. I would try new SATA data cables for SATA devices connected to the motherboard.

You stated HP Diagnostics pass. Are you testing all storage devices?

Try running Microsoft's System File Checker (Link) on both storage devices when running Windows.

Intermittent problems are very hard to troubleshoot.

Regards