Boot Issues

[Hovis]

Hi

My laptop will no longer boot, and it's only 16 months old. I can get to the BIOS screen and have run the System Diagnostics multiple times with each hardware test passing. I cannot get to System Recovery, each time the laptop freezes at the HP please wait screen. So far I have...

Done a full system test and they all passed.

Tried a reset by holding in the power button for 15 seconds.

Flashed the BIOS to the latest version.

Removed 1 stick of ram at a time and replaced them, trying to boot each time with different sticks removed.

Removed and tried a fresh M.2

Removed and tried a fresh SSD.

Tried a fresh install of Win10 from a USB stick but this freezes after reading the stick, and just displays the HP logo.

Tried to install Linux but this freezes after identifying that the stick contains Fedora, and just displays the HP logo.

Occasionally it will give me a Windows stop code, but this changes codes each time. After the code display it will freeze at the preparing to whatever screen.

Head is pretty frazzled by this one.

Any help would be brilliant!

[WAWood]

@Hovis 

Well ... you certainly tried a lot more than anyone else has reported.

Did you trying running Linux from a "live CD" (I know, old term -- probably a USB stick these days)? IF that works, at least you know the laptop will boot and work.

You said you tried both a new m.2 SSD and SATA SSD.  Were these blank?  Or did you install Windows to them (somehow) and they SHOULD have booted OK?

The freezing on install certainly sounds like a bad target drive -- but if you tried this with both the m.2 SSD and SATA SSD, and they both failed to install, this sounds suspiciously like a motherboard issue -- as that is the only thing I can think of that is common to all these issues.

Unfortunately, HP does not have motherboard diagnostics we can provide you to check it out.

Since I'm guessing you do not have an extended warranty (or you would have mentioned that), then your only recourse at this point would be to hunt down a local laptop repair facility to see if they can run diagnostics on it for you.

Good Luck

[Hovis]

Thanks for the reply @WAWood, I appreciate the assistance. Both the M.2 and SATA SSD were fresh new drives, but I also tried to install both with and seperate to existing hardware. Live CD was the reason I turned to Linux because obviously you don't have to install, so yea, I've tried that. Disabled UEFI because that can be an issue, but still no joy so I guess as the motherboard is the common denominator, you could be right. It's probably the one thing I didn't want to admit could be the issue in a laptop.

Why buy a laptop for gaming...