Can't Boot Optane-Enabled HP ENVY Desktop - 750-630xt CTO With USBDrive

[buster921]

My PC is Optane-enabled (16 GB). It crashed and wouldn't reboot following a power outage. A data recovery service was able to recover most of my data but told me the hard drive needed replacing (the original drive was a Western Digital Blue Label 1TB drive). I swapped out the damaged hard drive with a brand new Western Digital Blue Label 2 TB drive and tried to boot the computer using a bootable USB drive created using Microsoft's Media Creation Tool.

Before inserting the USB drive, i turned on the computer and pressed F10. Under the storage tab, there was an option for specifying the "boot order". I selected USB Hard Drive under the UEFI settings, accepted and saved the new settings and exited. The computer then restarted. However, it did not boot. Instead I got a blue screen display that showed the following:

Boot Device Not Found

Please install an operating system on your hard disk

Hard Disk - (3FO)

F2 - System Diagnostics

For more information, please visit:

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

Questions:

1. Is my system even seeing the bootable USB drive? It doesn't seem like that to me, and I don't know why.

2. Is the problem with the media creation setup on the USB drive, i.e., do I need to try to download and reinstall the media creation tool on the drive?

3. Is Optane somehow preventing the system from using the bootable USB drive?

4. Assuming the drive, data on the drive and Optane are all ok, is there something else i need to do to get the computer to recognize the USB drive and reinstall Windows 10?

Very frustrating. Any help or insights would be gratefully appreciated.

[Grzwacz]

Hi,

I am not a big fan of Optane cache drives. I would have removed the Optane drive and replaced with a 500 GB or1 TB M.2 NVME drive. Install Windows on this device, no need for Optane.

I would enter the BIOS with no external drives connected to the PC, start the PC, tap "ESC", then select "F10".

Check storage devices. You should see the Optane drive (16GB or 32 GB) and the new 2 TB HDD. You should set Storage Options to AHCI if you remove the Optane drive.

Now, on to the USB boot device problem. I would select "F9" at startup to select a one time boot device option to temporarily boot to the UEFI USB flash drive (not a USB HDD) to start the W10 installation. The USB drive may not support UEFI if the drive is not in the UEFI boot device submenu.

The W10 setup should start if you created a UEFI W10 installation USB drive. If you created this USB drive on an older PC and you did not select create this media for a different PC, the drive may not support UEFI mode. 

Regards

[buster921]

Many thanks for your suggestions. I'll give them a go.