Bios won't save settings

[Radzer0]

So we had a drive failure and now im trying to load this from a windows 10 flash drive. Also have tried a DVD on an external drive without luck. It has bios F13 and I cant get into windows to update it.

Ive even tried to go and turn off secure boot and it shows disabled when i f10 and save but it reboots and its back enabled. 

Any ideas for me here? It wont even accept disks that work on other secureboot enabled machines. Guessing its a bios bug but I wouldnt know how to get it into any type of mode to load a new bios from USB or even where to download a non windows flash package. 

[CherylG]

Are you tapping Esc key immediately after powering on to halt boot and open the startup menu? From there you should be able to tap F9 to select which device to boot from.

[Radzer0]

Correct. Its not showing the flash drive or windows 10 disk just like if you gave it a disk that wouldnt boot in secure boot. 

I managed to get it into bios recovery and its been doing stuff for a while now. Hoping I can manage to get the newer bios version. Apparently f13 was pulled for "issues".

[Radzer0]

It tried for about 10 minutes to do a recovery bios. The flash drive had F20 on it. Eventually it rebooted and it still has F13 and any settings i change and tell it to save it wont save. 

[CherylG]

@Radzer0

Normally you don't need to disable Secure Boot to boot from USB if it is created with Media Creation Tool at Microsoft site. However I have seen some report if they make the USB on a non-UEFI machine it doesn't work. How did you make your USB?

When disabling Secure Boot- you should let the machine start up once without trying to boot from anything.That should result in a screen asking if you are sure you want the change-or something similiar. it will tell you to type the code shown on the screen to confirm. There is no input box for the code- you simply type it.

The latest BIOS for your machine is on your Support page-I don't see an F.20. If you download and run it-you should have an option to create a BIOS USB. Then you use the BIOS recovery option- insert the flash drive in a port, hold the Windows + B key and press the power button for 2-3 seconds. Continue holding the Win + B keys and hopefully yu will get the BIOS flash screen.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-envy-m6-p100-notebook-pc-touch/10135668/model/10...

[Radzer0]

Created with the tool. I assume the bios recovery bootable usb runs a stripped version of the windows 10 installer? i can get it to come up with a installer page and it "fakes" installing. But there isnt a windows 10 on that usb thats in it. 

As far as the windows key +B thats what I did before with the recovery USB in it and it didnt update the version. Also my mistake on that, I thought I saw f20 but its f19. Checked with the SP*.exe number on my other PC. 

In that "fake" setup that seems to be loading up somehow. It doesnt show my USB flash drive under the drives. 

I find it very weird it appears to think its still installing from a empty flash drive with just the bios recovery. 

[CherylG]

That is a little weird since the USB BIOS Recovery isn't bootable. The laptop simply reads from it when triggered with Win + B key.

Perhaps it is running from the recovery partition on the hard drive. Or, did you replace the crashed hdd?

[Radzer0]

Drive was replaced and unpartitioned.

Strangely enough though now its going thru the final stuff on the setup. But I have to goto the boot menu and manually go into the efi folders and tell it where to boot. Any ideas on this one? Being the bios doesnt want to save changes im thinking maybe it isnt looking for EFI devices properly.  Could be why its not booting and such as well. 

[CherylG]

So which flash drive do you have in now? You said it was doing a "fake" install from the USB BIOS drive.

I have no idea about having to choose the EFI file- but have seen that suggested before when there was problems seeing the flash drive installer.

[Radzer0]

Was the bios recovery flash drive. So every time it reboots I now have to direct it to the EFI boot file on the hard drive with F9. What its showing as windows boot manager is the old one that doesnt exist anymore. 

Ideas on that part? Its a pain because the F-Keys dont always work and sometimes it takes quite a few power cycles to get it to come up again.