Issue with booting my OS

[Franaconda]

Hello everyone smarter than me,

First off, a bit of history. I had a problem with my laptop not charging. I read online that if you take out the battery and hold in the power button might fix the problem, and it worked.

But, alas, when I turned on my laptop, it gave me a 3F0 error and said ''boot device not found''. After going to HP support page, I followed the steps to create a bios recovery flash drive, successfully.

The problem is that the steps require me to
1) hit esc as laptop boots up
2) press f2 to load diagnostics
3) insert the flash-drive. (but here lies the problem, it sounds like a menu should open up that allows me to update the bios, but I only have 3 options, test memory, test storage, test hard drives.)

Any suggestions? Do I even need to update the bios or must I install a clean OS? if so how? 

Edit Update: I managed to boot up my Windows after enabling legacy mode. But it doesn't boot up when I switch legacy mode off after a restart. So it looks like I will have to keep legacy mode on. Does anyone know why this would be the case? 

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

It sounds to me like you have Windows installed in Legacy mode and not UEFI mode.

Legacy mode uses a different boot structure than UEFI mode does which is why the notebook won't boot up when you disable legacy mode.

You can confirm that Windows is installed in Legacy mode by running the Windows system information app.

About 1/3 of the way down on the report, there will be a BIOS mode line.

It will either indicate UEFI or Legacy.

If you want to disable Legacy mode again there is a way to do that without having to reinstall Windows, but it is a bit complicated.

Make sure you back up your files before proceeding to try this.

Here is one such video for how to convert from Legacy mode to UEFI

How to change Legacy to UEFI without reinstalling Windows 10, 11 (youtube.com)

If you successfully convert the drive to GPT when you restart the PC and enter the BIOS (ESC>F10), you just disable legacy mode and that puts your PC in UEFI mode.

If that doesn't work, you will have to clean install Windows in UEFI mode by booting the Windows installation flash drive from the UEFI USB boot source, not the legacy one.

[Franaconda]

Wow! Thanks for the quick response, 

That's very interesting, I'll be sure to follow your suggestions. Is there any advantage to UEFI? Is it worth all the effort? 

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

When you watch the video, the guy has a list of the differences between legacy and UEFI mode.

The major issue would be that if you want to automatically upgrade to W11, that requires your PC to have Secure Boot enabled and the only way to do that would be to have legacy mode disabled in the BIOS.

You can install W11 in your PC in legacy mode, but you have to use a workaround to do it.