locked out of UEFI BIOS after HD upgrade

[its1louder]

Hi There,

I have 2x 17" HP envy's I use for work.  One is a pretty mission critical instrument support machine, the other is my daily use machine.  Both running linux and booting from the UEFI BIOS.  I decided to take the time over the holiday and upgrade the HD on one to 2TB since I am running out of space on it and swap one drive into the other.  I think the UEFI BIOS has some sort of theft protection scheme or something?  Anyway, on both machines now I get the (3f0) no boot device error referenced here.  I tried to put the original disks back in, that didn't help.  I tried a couple times the advice to reset the BIOS but it didn't work.  Then I noticed what looked like a CMOS Battery so I disconnected that and reconnected it.  This got a new error message, CMOS Reset (502).  That lingers for a few seconds and then goes back to the 3F0 error.  Is there anyway to really reset the BIOS and start over?  I've also tried to reboot with a system rescue live USB Stick, it doesn't work either.  Any advice how to un-brick these laptops?

[its1louder]

I should also add, that I've run the limitted diagnostics available and on both PC's it said the disks passed both tests, so it's not like I damaged a SATA connector or something.  If I run it with no disk installed it correctly identifies the fact that there is no disk installed.

[its1louder · Accepted solution]

OK I figured out something that works.  Pressing f2 lets you get into the bios.  Doing this I was able to turn on legacy boot support.  Then presing f9 at boot lets you get into a boot selector.  I could see the usb key to boot system-recue-cd livecd on the usb key.  From this I was able to chroot into my hard disk files ystem and run efibootmgr and refind-install to get my boot loader (rEFInd) working with the bios and boot partition of the new hard disk I installed.  Now it all boots up and I am finishing up configuring my new disk.