[F.39 BIOS] [HP dv4 5109tx] Not booting in UEFI mode at all.

[savvy2]

now you ask about pen drives,  USB flash memory sticks, it ok but is tricky too.

ever use RUFUS?, and burn a stick using the dual mode, with safe boot off?

you must format a pen drive properly or it will not boot in UEFI systems.

this stick below work, on all my PC,s regardless. if HP or homemade with W10 from scratch.

test,2

make bootable UEFI test HDD/SSD drive on another working system then used here, I bet it works  moved to the offending system, above,  at least boots, not w10 running perfect (due to setup for wrong chips,etc,pnp and all)

just the boot works.  is this test.

but i have not tired this, yet, using only GPT ,swaps. it should at least boot

i think the only limits are the having 2 drives in 1 system with same GUID signature like what happens in cloning.'

see line 2, ignore linux

me, X , INTEL. no MS

I do not think the HP has structures, that causes, MBR2GPT to fail. (only looses HP partitions and not mess up the boot.

The EUFI for Apps deal sould not effect boots...

The MS site clearly states that it is not a 100% thing,  MBR2GPT.exe has limits.

be fun to talk the coder on that. be fun to hear the fun stories on the failures.

did you run,  Crystaldiskinfo to see that the target, hdd run out of spare cluster, and for disk check error it causes>?

the OS might be infected making mbr2gpt.exe to mess up.

To me it all sounds like coin toss,  given what could go wrong, in the conversion..

NO LIE< UEFI is tricky business,  considering how simple MBR is and so flexible.....

[ZergRush]

Thanks for the info Savvy. I have used Rufus and I have created the disk manually as well. I did mention that the drive boots up on a HP Z230 without any issues. So the disk is partitioned as GPT and is UEFI bootable. The problem like I said is not with the USB disk.

There is no cloning involved in here, so we don't hit the scenario which you are describing.

I have seen HP & Lenovo laptops that have OEM partition. There is no mapping for OEM partitions by default, therefore if you run MBR2GPT without the switch it will fail.

No bad clusters on the destination disk in any form. Disks are healthy and readable.

Is there any infromation regarding HP_TOOLS partition? How can I re-create it on the machine?

Has any booted up a DV4 laptop on UEFI?

I get the 3FO error right on boot when it's booting up with Legacy support Disabled. Why isn't HP reading the \EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi file from the disk?

Need help on this guys.? How can I boot my machine in UEFI mode?

[savvy2]

sounds like that newest DV4 BIOS has bugs.

you many have to contact HP directly and file support ticket or what ever they need to get the ball rolling.

Ive no clue how, sorry.

for sure you went the distance to isolate what is wrong, the BIOS.(UEFI updates missing or wrong)

[ZergRush · Accepted solution]

Alright Fellas, I got some good news. I was able to boot the laptop in UEFI mode. 

In this process, I learnt a lot of EFI in general - boot order, boot variables, efibootmgr and EFI Shell commands.

So here is what i did -

My laptop which was running on F.39 BIOS did not boot in UEFI at all. Because it fails to recognize the ESP on GPT disk while booting. However, Network boot was still functional in UEFI mode. So, I connected a WDS Server (Windows Deployment Server) via lan cable and PXE booted it into Windows PE running in UEFI mode. Now, I can't proceed with installation of Windows here and expect it to boot in UEFI on reboot. 

Simply because the problem is with the NVRAM. None of the entries within NVRAM mark the Internal hard drive as a UEFI bootable device. Therefore, I decided to mod the WDS Server so that I can boot into EFI Shell. I replaced the wdsmgfw.efi file with Shellx64.efi file. Once this was done, I was able to get into EFI Shell by pxebooting using WDS server.

I was in EFI Shell, so I could view the boot configuration using bcfg boot dump -v and also check the device handles related to disk by the command - dh -p DiskIO.

The device handle indicated that the first GPT partition on my disk is a EFI System partition. But the EFI variables on the firmware does not mention the same. This was the same case with the mapping table, the ESP was not recognized as a filesystem device (FSn: ) by the EFI Shell. But it was recognized as blockIO (BLKn: ).

But now, since I was in an EFI environment. I had the opportunity to boot into Windows. By chain booting though, not directly. So, I create a FAT partition on a pendrive, copy the bootx64.EFI and the BCD files for booting into the hard drive on the pendrive. Once I am in the EFI shell, I run the following commands

map -r >> To check if the FAT partition on the drive is recognized as a filesystem device (FS0: )

If it's still recognized as a block IO, then you run dh -p DiskIO which will provide you the device handle for the USB FAT Partition. On my machine the output (map and dh commands) was like this -

The EFI environment was recognizing the ESP but not treating it as a Filesystem device. Which is a pretty serious bug. 

Basically, this means that every person running on F.39 BIOS when they convert their machine to UEFI, it might be non-bootable. 

Now, All I have to do is to attach my FAT pendrive.

Identify it's device handle ID - 1E0, 1F1 etc. by running dh -p DiskIO

and then run reconnect 1C0.

After this, the FAT partition on the pendrive is recognized as a filesystem device, meaning I can browse the contents by typing in FS0: or FS1:

I then went into FS0:\EFI\Boot\ and typed in bootx64.EFI and the machine booted into Windows :).

Within Windows I tried EasyUEFI to add the boot entry to the firmware NVRAM to see if that works. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Changes lost on reboot. I also tried booting into Ubuntu 17.04 using a similar procedure as above.

In Ubuntu, I tried Efibootmgr to modify the NVRAM, this also didn't work. The changes were lost on reboot.

Now, I decided to use the EFI shell's native command -bcfg to create a new variable in NVRAM. I was able to create the variable and once I typed exit I could see the variable as a boot option on the HP BIOS boot menu. But when I reboot the machine, the changes made were again lost and the newly created variable was gone. I was now pretty confident that this was not a disk or Windows issue, since I was able to boot into Windows on EFI platform. Rather, this was a defect within the firmware which causes ESP partitions to be ignored while booting in GPT using the internal hard drive.

I tried reinstalling F.39 BIOS via Windows but that didn't help either. Finally, I decided to downgrade to F.37 BIOS. Once the BIOS flash was completed, the laptop rebooted and it showed me a blue screen stating "Flashing boot block" with a progress indicator. 

The time, I saw the blue hp logo and the Windows spinning dots. Machine booted up directly in UEFI via the internal hard drive 

So, I have to admit that savvy2 guess is pretty good 🙂 I don't think HP is going to release a fix for this problem even though this is a pretty serious problem within their BIOS. It breaks UEFI boot totally.

For those who are unable to boot in UEFI using the F.39 BIOS on HP dv4 5109tx. Please downgrade to F.37 using the above methods.

Thanks a lot for all your help! I will now mark this as resolved.

Peace!

[bsforte]

Bro can you help me, i have the same problem with the bios F.39 on a HP DV4 5164LA, but the problem it's i can't go back to another bios. When i tried installing via windows, the system reboot and the screen stay in black, i need to power off and power on again but the bios still be the same F.39. Thanks for your help

[kevin-t]

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