HP Envy TE02-0042: Initial setup goes well except on reboot, only DARK SCREEN displays

[alguin2]

We just bought our nephew an HP Envy Desktop TE02-0042 gaming PC for a graduation gift. 

I've setup many Windows PC's both for work and personal use, so I'm not new at this.

After unpacking, we connected it to a HDMI 2.1 monitor, a gigabit network, and powered it up. Everything went well in the initialization and setup, it seems.  At the end of the setup, it was getting late, so we chose to select update and shutdown,  to pickup where we left off on the next day.

Today (the next day), we powered up the PC.  We got the HP "cycling circle" screen, then after a few seconds, the screen goes dark, and... NOTHING. We wait for 15 minutes, and the screen is still dark and nothing. After another 30 minutes, we do a longpress+forced powerdown. We do restarts... same thing. We connect to another monitor... same thing: HP "cycling circle" then dark screen.

What's going on?

I selected this specific model for: the 12th gen i9 CPU, 16G RAM, SSD drive, RTX 3070, and HP name. I'm a developer & have worked with HP ProLiant Linux servers & business workstations for 10+ years, so I was expecting the same from this desktop. 

I hope that it wasn't a mistake.

[Bill_To]

Hi @alguin2 

It looks like you may have some operating system corruption after aborting Windows Updates.

You could also have a hardware problem. Same symptoms after doing the following procedure could confirm a hardware issue.

Probably the easiest way to attempt a fix is to use a different PC to create a HP USB Cloud Recovery drive for this PC.

Boot to this USB recovery drive on the new PC. Do a cloud recovery (mouse, keyboard, and monitor).

There are other ways to try a fix but they are involved and don't always work.

A failed recovery using the correct recovery image for your PC and good USB recovery media would suggest a hardware problem.

Regards