HP Laptop Refuses to Boot From USB Installation Media

[AltarZeng]

I have tried swapping between legacy and secure boot and just about everything. I’ve tried cloning my old HDD to an SSD and booting from that and it won’t work either. I have two original HDDs which will both boot, but are slow, so I am trying to replace them. They are both from the exact same model. I at this point am fine with using a fresh installation, but it won’t even do that. It will load the data on the install media, the HP logo will come on to the screen, looking distorted or warped, and the spinner will appear, only to freeze and reboot. 

[WAWood]

@AltarZeng 

The first thing you need to know is that you can not LEGALLY reuse a drive from one HP PC on another.  Why? Because the Windows license is OEM and that is tied to the PC, not to the Owner.  While there is nothing to stop you from doing such a swap,  when you get the PC booting from a different drive and go online, it will deactivate Windows -- and once that happens, you will NOT be able to reactivate it because HP will not provide you another OEM license.

Second, I don't know how you "Cloned" the HDD to an SDD because that is a generic term that most folks use incorrectly -- because Cloning means to make an Exact Copy, and if the HDD is larger than the SDD, then clearly, you can not make an exact copy of the first to the second.  Most folks just copy the OS partition -- and that does NOT work.

That said, some Cloning apps will allow you to copy from a larger drive to a smaller and will resize the partitions in the process.  I use Macrium Reflect version 8, and it allows that to be done.  So, if you used one of these, then the Cloning SHOULD have worked.  You would need to check the SSDs to ensure ALL the partitions are there, including the ESP (Fat 32) partition and the OS (NTFS) partition.  If they are, then I don't know why the Cloning did not work.

[AltarZeng]

Luckily, I did not connect the computer to the internet when I did so, so the OS's should not be unlicensed. This raises a lot of questions though. How the heck do I go about making a fresh install on a different drive at all on this laptop? Is it even possible? None of my bootables work, and I've created multiple at this point.