Hp spectre x360 stuck in boot loop after bios update

[AreJayyy]

Howdy,

My girlfriend’s laptop (HP spectre x360 convertible 15-eb1xxx) about a week ago booted up to a black screen. I first made sure to check brightness and try resetting and hard resetting the laptop. Nothing changed. I noticed after a while that the face recognition lights at the top of the laptop edge would flicker (ir lights, no light from the screen. The screen never flickers on at all during startup or shutdown. It’s completely black) so I knew that the laptop was likely working. I connected the laptop via HDMI to an external monitor to verify the board and graphics drivers and all of the internals were working okay. The laptop worked completely fine, as well as the actual touch screen on the laptop worked too, all apart from the actual display of the laptop being completely black. I made sure to check device manager and saw that there was no screen recognized by the OS, only the one I had plugged in. When I opened windows display settings it only could detect one single display, that being the external monitor I had plugged in.

I tried troubleshooting, checking for windows updates, driver updates, and making sure all graphics drivers were up to date. Still no help. I was pretty sure it was a hardware issue at this point but still wanted to be sure. My bit set screwdrivers actually did not have the right set to open the laptop and disconnect and reconnect the battery or check for water damage or corrosion so that in the only step I still have not gotten to do. 

One of the last steps I wanted to try was updating the BIOS. If I recall correctly (not 100% sure), the laptop was running the BIOS version F.09 for intel processors. I saw on hp’s website for the specific model of laptop that the recommended version is F.15, so I downloaded and installed the updated BIOS. No issues arose, no power disconnect or anything went wrong during the BIOS update. Once updated, after going to boot the laptop it became stuck in a boot loop.

Ive gone through boot loop diagnosis before, but this one has me beat. After opening the BIOS, I realized just how primitive and limited it is. I made sure to still reset all setting to defaults, and try booting. Once it was in a boot loop, I went back into the BIOS to attempt to revert the update. It said that the previous version was not found, and I have since learned that HP locked BIOS reverting due to security reasons.

The boot loop consists of:

-1 boot attempt with the HP logo that says “preparing windows recovery mode” but blue screens after a few minutes of spinning with the stop code: DRIVER_PNP_WATCHDOG

-1 boot attempt that just has the hp logo that spins for a long time 

I decided my efforts were toast so I went and got my spare USB and used Rufus to create a bootable windows 11 USB. Once I changed the boot priority and made sure “BOOT FROM USB” was enabled, I went into “recover windows”. I am only given six options, none of which deal with reinstalling windows, as I assume the recovery on the USB only works for the version of windows on that drive. When I go to actually install windows, there are no drives listed. The laptop’s drive of course has an  OS partition and a storage partition, and my 32gig usb has a 10 gig partition for the windows bootable and another partition for extra files I was attempting to transfer onto the laptop like explained in this YouTube video:

https://youtu.be/Ode1010Sr5w?si=RUF4TyvXRxuxhmMx

I have given up trying to troubleshoot on my own because I have now made the problem worse going from the screen not working to being stuck in a boot loop. If anyone has any information it would be greatly appreciated.

more info:

There was no sudden physical damage to the laptop.

No strange excess heat was coming from the laptop, everything seemed perfectly normal apart from the screen being black.

When I leave it in the boot loop unplugged and turn it back on after a few hours, it lists the message:

HP Battery Alert-

BIOS has detected that the storage capacity of the internal battery has been reduced. This may be caused by environmental factors such as law ambient operating temperature, or it could be due to battery pack aging.

Operating your system in a warmer location or operating your unit for some period of time may resolve this condition. If the condition persists or if you have an older system, please contact HP service.

Primary (internal) Battery (601)

ENTER - Continue Stantup

For more information, please

WIS1t

http://www.hp.com/go/00Asystenboarderror

(the battery was in perfect condition, would last days between charges)

At this stage, all I can do is get into the BIOS when booting from the main boot drive and get to the empty drive page when going to reinstall windows from my Rufus drive. 
I don’t see why updating the BIOS would cause this or if it’s just representative of a board/hardware issue, I saw on another support thread that when someone got the same stop code (DRIVER_PNP_WATCHDOG) it was because of faulty trackpad hardware. Once it was disconnected, the laptop booted into windows. I was suspicious this was of the same nature, but now that I have both the issue of the screen and the boot loop, I feel defeated.

[Elohi_NR]

Hi @AreJayyy,

Welcome to the HP Support Community. 

I'd be happy to help you! 

Excellent description and a great diagnosis. It is greatly appreciated.           

This might require one-on-one interaction to fix the issue.

I would request you to contact our HP Support Engineers who should be able to sort this out via remote assistance. 

For that to happen, we will give you additional instructions/information via Private Message.

Please check your inbox on the forums page for the private message.

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