Unable to boot with multiple errors

[J_7]

Hi, I am hoping someone can help me with this situation.

I have a HP Pavilion All-in-One (see product selection for full model). It has an internal Toshiba SSD which is the C: Drive / Boot drive. For a few months now, I have had somewhat regular freezes where I cannot click anything or interact with anything on my screen, but can still usually see my mouse cursor moving around.

Whenever these freezes occur, if I have been able to have Task Manager open at the time, the Performance tab shows 100% C: drive utilisation with quite high response times (often 100s of ms, or 1000s of ms) until it eventually unfreezes and goes back to 0-20ms. I downloaded Crystal Disk Info to see what that would tell me, and I don't think it tells me much other than the drive health is around 35%. Either way, I have been considering getting a new SSD soon to replace it, worried that it is starting to fail (and extra storage would be nice).

Yesterday, the computer froze again as it has been. And it didn't show any signs of unfreezing. So I had to hold in the power button to force a shutdown.

Attempting to turn the computer back on, I received a 'CMOS checksum error' of some sort. I didn't take a picture of it and can't remember the exact wording, but it advised me to press Enter to reset the CMOS, which I did. (This is the only time I received this error)

This was then followed by a red "Secure Boot Violation" error, "Invalid signature detected. Check Secure Boot Policy in Setup."

Pressing OK, I got another error:
"Boot Device Not Found

Please install an operating system on your hard disk.

Hard Disk - (3F0)

F2 - System Diagnostics

For more information, please visit:

http://www.hp.com/go/techcenter/startup"

I pressed F2 to go to Diagnostics, and completed a full/advanced "Long DST Check" which passed with no errors. It also confirms that the system recognises that the SSD exists. 

Rebooting the computer and pressing F10 to get into the BIOS. The BIOS date and time were wrong, showing 1st January 2021, so I corrected these and rebooted. The Boot tab of BIOS also shows UEFI Boot Order as "OS Boot Manager".

Each time I have rebooted, I am still getting the Secure Boot Violation and No Boot Drive errors.

Could anyone give some advice on how to resolve this? Let me know if you need any further info of my errors or from the BIOS or diagnostics.

My next step was to try and get Windows 11 onto a USB drive and run the repair tool but thought I'd ask here first as I might get some helpful replies! I have not attempted to disable Secure Boot yet

Thanks in advance

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

See if turning off the secure boot setting in the BIOS allows you to boot back into Windows.

Probably what happened is when you cleared the CMOS it reloaded the HP factory default secure boot certificates which were probably the 2011 version that has now been superseded by the 2023 certificates.

If that works and you can get into windows, run the Windows Update app to see if Windows downloads and installs the 2023 certificates again...the updates might be labeled 'KEK" something or other.

Once the 2023 secure boot certificates are reinstalled, you should be able to turn the secure boot setting back on.

I agree with you that the drive is starting to fail, so if you have any files you want to save, back them up onto a portable hard drive if you can get back into Windows.

The drive can fail at any time.

[J_7]

Hi, thanks a lot for your response.

That makes sense. Turning off secure boot allowed me to get back in.

Windows Update does not show any available updates though, other than this month's preview. Is there another way I can prompt Windows to download the latest certificates? Or will it appear eventually?

Thanks again

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

You're very welcome.

See if the info at the link below is of help to you:

How to install the 2023 Secure Boot certificates on Windows 11 (and 10) before the 2026 expiration -...

If that doesn't work, the only other suggestion I can offer would be to try the steps outlined in this discussion:

The solution highlighted in green.

Solved: Re: Secure Boot Violation 0 FIX - HP Support Community - 9700910

[J_7]

Hi, thanks again for your reply.

I had a look at the first link you posted. This stated quite explicitly that secure boot must be enabled to use that method. Considering that I had to disable secure boot to actually get onto my device, I moved onto the next method.

That second method is what I went with, and it aligned with advice I also found here - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/servicing/os/secure-boot/2026/03/secure-boot-troubleshooting-gui...

I can confirm that this was successful and updated the certificates back to the 2023 versions, allowing me to re-enable secure boot and not have violation errors!

Now onto finding a new SSD.... thank you for your help!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Anytime.

Glad to have been of assistance.