Elitebook 850 G5: cannot boot from USB

[Mues_Lee]

Hello,

I recently bought an used Elitebook 850 G5 (refurbished), Win10 was already installed. After booting I started windows update. After rebooting, the notebook was stucked in an endles "automatic repair is starting" loop.

F11 system recovery didn't work.

F2 system diagnostics, all passed.

I created a rescue stick for repair, didn't work.

So i created a Win10 installation stick, but it won't boot.

I tried all the secure boot options, legacy on/off, UEFI on/off.

When I boot the stick in UEFI, after a few seconds the system reboots.

If I boot in legacy mode, screen stays black and nothing happens.

Then I tried different linux distros. At least boot selection menu is showing up, after pressing enter to start linux the notebook reboots itself.

Tried 3 different sticks, USB 2.0 and 3.0, with no success 😞

[Mues_Lee]

Additional info: when I boot without any usb stick a screen appears "HP Sure Recover" and start downloading some files. After it finished downloading ..... the system reboots 😕

[Mues_Lee]

After a sleepless night:

Created installations sticks with rufus. Tried:

- Win10 old and new versions, didn't work

- Win 11, didn't work

- FreeDos, didn't work

- Linux Mint/Ubunti/Debian booted at least into bootmanager

- ReactOS, didn't work

- Grub4Dos, booted

- UEFI Shell, booted but keyboard was not working

Found something similar here on the forums, linked to an older FreeDos image, now this booted. Used fdisk to create a DOS partition on the harddisk. But FDOS won't install to harddisk. After reboot, HP Sure Recover is downloading again AND started some recovery tasks. Keeping fingers crossed.

So I seems like installation of Windows from USB stick does not work as long as there is no partition created (I erased the harddrive via BIOS). Totally weird and frustrating.