2020 Spectre X360 stuck at logo, does not boot, cannot use Recovery

[2020_Spect_x360]

My 2020 Spectre X360 has been at times sluggish booting, but I did not think much about it.  It got stuck a few times, but pressing and holding the power button to turn it off and then re-booting worked.  Now it is not booting anymore, it remains stuck at the HP logo with the circling dots.  I must have rebooted a hundred times, no improvement.

1. I updated the BIOS recently, it's version F.28. 
2. I ran all tests in "System Diagnostics" (F2), and all I found was that the battery needs "calibration", nothing else.
3. In the "System Recovery" (F11) menu, nothing works.  Under "Troubleshoot", "Startup Repair", I get an error message "Startup Repair couldn't repair your PC".  "Uninstall Updates" also yields error messages. Same for "System Restore": "To use System Restore, you must specify which Windows installation to restore"; and "System Image Recovery": a system image cannot be found".
4. I tried booting from USB, but that's not making a difference.  I don't know whether I'm doing things right, but when I seem to have booted from USB, the "System Recovery" (F11) menu has an additional option, "Recover from a drive", but that does not help.
   
   1. In the "Configuration Menu" (F10), "Boot Options", I have "USB Boot" enabled and "Secure Boot" disabled.  In the "UEFI Boot Order", the first item is USB Flash Drive/USB Hard Disk.  There is no mention of "Legacy ..." anywhere. 
   2. I created two USB recovery drives, one after I bought the computer, and one yesterday, using another computer and the "HP Cloud Recovery Tool".  I have two different USB-C-to-A adapters.  The computer seems to find the USB drives, but the option to boot from USB ("Boot Menu", F9) comes up only with the recovery USB that I created a while ago.  The "Cloud Recovery Tool" does not give me that option. 
   3. I don't know what to expect from "boot from USB": should it just take me to the recovery options (F11), or should there be more? When I boot without stopping startup (Esc), the HP logo appears (without the circling dots), a blue screen with these options appears: "Recover from a drive", "Troubleshoot", and "Turn off your PC".  "Troubleshoot" does not work, as before; the additional option, "Recover from a drive", is promising, but nothing works: "Just remove my files" and "Fully clean the drive" end up with "There was a problem recovering your PC".
5. Sometimes, when I exit the F11 menu and the computer tries to boot from the hard drive, it asks me for the (very long) Bitlocker Recovery Key.  No idea whether that's important.

I'm at a loss.  Is there any way to get this computer to run again?  There are no important files on the computer, luckily I have made backups, so I don't care if I need to reinstall everything.  But it would be nice if I could get this 16-month-old computer to work again. 

Thank you!

[iomare · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I would try creating a bootable USB with Windows 10 on it driectly from Microsoft using the media creation tool (on different PC)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Then use the USB drive to perform a clean install of the OS.

During installation choose custom install and delete all partitions. Install in unallocated space.

Once installed go into settings and completely update the machine (Windows will find the necessary drivers)

Hope it helps,

David

[2020_Spect_x360]

That worked, thank you!  Busy doing all the stuff with drivers, updates, etc., and then reinstalling software.

I'm surprised that Microsoft was the solution, and I was a little disappointed by HP. 

Anyway, thanks again!

[iomare]

You're welcome,

Glad u got it sorted.

Let me know if you need any further help.

Take care,

David

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3sXlRZxPRY