3F0 Boot Device Not Found Error

[EricP8]

Hello.

I may have screwed things by trying to fix this myself but this is what happened. My laptop was fine a couple of days ago. Shut it down for the night and then the next day, after I boot and log in, I get a Blue Screen error "Inaccessible Boot Device."

This happened a week or so after installing a new card of RAM.

I try reloading several times and I keep getting the same crash, or a Boot recovery type window giving me options to reinstall windows and the like. I only did things that were diagnostic at that time but nothing changed. However at some point the laptop stopped getting the log in screen and started giving me the "3F0 Boot Device Not Found Error". When i used the black screen diagnostic window (which this window let me go to by pressing F2) the drive test said the drive was fine, but I guess it should have given me two drive results since this laptop has a small HD and a larger 500GB SSD.

I thought the I should try to reinstall win 10 from scratch using a USB to the tiny HD. This "worked" in that I could get into windows, but it is barebones and is missing the features the laptop had when I was using it normally, such as now there is no space on the HD, no function keys work, audio doesn't work, and a bunch of other problems, including not having access to the SSD at all. I now realize the SSD was probably the issue all the time. Not sure how I could fix that, and even though I was careful, maybe I did something that caused the SSD to have issues when installing the new RAM.

Hopefully it isn't completely botched but that is the current situation. 

Thanks.

[banhien]

@EricP8 

Please use the following Official Guide to fix

                        HP PCs - Hard disk 3F0 boot device not found error

Regards.

[EricP8]

@Banhien

HP Consumer Notebook PCs - Boot Device Not Found (3F0) or Automatic Repair Errors (https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06201699)

procedure one F2

RESULTS:

quick or extensive check: Testing drive 1
smart check passed
long DST: NOT AVAILABLE

(I don't think the SSD is being checked because it is currently undetectable by the system.)

procedure 3

Intel optane not listed

HP PCs - Hard disk 3F0 boot device not found error (https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_3053911-2842957-16)

1 Update the BIOS

Updating the BIOS automatically using Device Manager in Windows
no update found (driver version is 10.0.19041.1), windows updates has a variety of updates because I reinstalled windows 10, but can't install them because the drive is too small (only <1.6gb free)

3 Perform hard drive tests in HP PC Hardware Diagnostics

quick or extensive check: Testing drive 1
smart check passed
long DST: NOT AVAILABLE

I don't think the SSD is being checked

4 Restore BIOS default settings

done

5 Reinstall Windows 10 on the hard drive

Well I already did this but inadvertently to the wrong drive (the hard drive) when windows was actually installed on the SSD.

Still I tried to run the HP Cloud Recovery Tool, but since the windows 10 is running from the tiny HD, there isn't enough space to download the necessary files to run it.