hp pavilion 570-p019na - Faulty HDD - replacing with Samsung 860 EVO SSD = cannot complete POST

[tarquel]

Some months back, I was helping my friend with her HP Pavilion Desktop 570-p010na.

Performance was shockingly bad and so in attempted to see why, I ran the UEFI Diagnostics tool and with the HDD test, it gave a error code, so looked like there was an issue there.

She carried on using it, despite the issues but then last week, she got in  touch to say that she was having difficulty "getting into it". A touch hard to extrapolate what exactly folks mean but in the process, she'd managed to forget her password and log in pin. Given the faulty HDD, i figured it'd be best to just get a new shiney SSD and have a nice clean win10 install from scratch 🙂

Ordered a Samsung 860 EVO 250 2.5" SSD and that arrived a few days later. Got the machine from her yesterday and got to work....

After 8+ hours over two days, I'm no further forward.

What happens is basically as the person on this thread describes:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/SSD-Upgrade-on-Pavillion-570-p0...

i.e. when the SSD is plugged in to [either] SATA connection, upon turning the computer on, it just sits there frozen - keyboard doesnt respond / unable to get into the BIOS / do anything at all. When the SSD is disconnected, the machine seems fine [as far as going in and out of the BIOS, changing settings, using a USB Stick with HP UEFI Diag Tools on it, etc].

Here's the sumamry of what i've tried:

- changed the SATA cable - twice

- Updated the BIOS from F20 to F25 [latest]

- Disabled / Enabled Secure Boot

- Disabled / Enabled Legacy 

- Disabled all Power Mgmt related settings I could find

- Reset the BIOS using the CMOS jumper

- Tried using SATA1 [where the optical drive is plugged into] instead of SATA0

- Plugged the Samsung SSD into my own computer [i have a 960 EVO M.2 drive :D] and ran the Samsung Magician software -the 860 EVO is recognised, genuine, and happy - noticed it said the firmware was out of date so updated that - just in case.... made no difference].

Due to reading threads about folks having to downgrade the BIOS in order for the machine to see a SSD, i was going to try that but was met with the message:

---

The System BIOS rollback failed.

Unable to open BIOS Signature file.

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The .bin and .sig files from the BIOS update are in the same location. It doesnt matter what version of BIOS i try, i get the same result (although i've noticed in these recent hours that there's no going back to older than F23, but yet, i can downgrade to F23 either].

Doesnt seem to matter if i try Update or Downgrade options [by manually selecting the BIOS file in UEFI Diag Tools, from the USB Flash Pen i made].

I'm a bit at a loss as to whether there's anything more i can do, short of buying more hardware to throw at it 😞

It's a difficult situation as the lady doesnt have the money to throw at new hardware [the SSD was prob the max i could manage for her] and typically the warranty ran out back in June 2018 so we dont have that angle to go on either.

Gonna see if i can scour some old SSD and/or HDD and/or SATA PCIe card from work to troubleshoot further but i'm blown away at how seemingly impossible this is which really should be quite a simple process to perform [20+ years as IT Pro blahblahblah].

Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks.

[tarquel]

Just to reply to myself, tried a 256GB Corsair MX100 (CT256MX100SSD1) SSD and exactly the same thing.

I then tried a Corsair ForceGS 128GB SSD and that fired up fine, so proceeded to use that and not a single wobble or problem with it.

To re-itterate, all three SSD's worked fine in my own computer [NOT a HP machine].

Just thought i'd update in case anyone else searches for this.