I'm unable to boot from CD rom

[Ianlee]

I'm trying to upgrade the hard drive in this HP 14-fq and I can't get the system to boot to an external cd drive with my cloning software on it. The BIOS boot order shows the CDrom and it allows me to change the boot order but the system won't boot to it. Bringing up the boot menu with F9 only shows the existing HDD and the EUFI file option. There is no Legacy support option in the BIOS even after disabling the secure boot. I thought of rolling back the BIOS version but there is no way to do it on this machine. Does anyone have any other options to try? with the existing small , HDD, there is not enough free space to update Windows11.  

[Paul_Tikkanen]

I hope you didn't buy a M.2 NVMe SSD because those won't work in any 14-fq0xxx notebook that comes with a 64 GB eMMC flash storage drive.

The service manual does not mention that exception.

Only M.2 SATA SD's will work.

Unfortunately, I can't help you with why you can't boot from a USB DVD drive..

Some of those drives require two USB port connections.

You can clean install W11 on the new SSD (assuming it is not NVMe) by making a bootable W11 USB installation flash drive with the media creation tool.

Download Windows 11 (microsoft.com)

[Ianlee]

I was able to install a 256G PCIe NVMe drive into this HP 14-fq0037nr notebook. I was also able to successfully clone the onboard 64G  to it.  Windows  11 sees it and assigns drive letter D. Disk manager shows it as Disk 0, while the 64G is Disk 1.  I can see all the partitions. Problem is I can't force the system to boot to the new drive. It doesn't show in the BIOS to change the boot order. I can select Boot to EFI file and point it to the bootx64.efi file on the new drive and it will boot fine and reassign to C:  On restart, the system reverts back to the old drive and reassigns the new one back to drive D.- I've even tried to unmount the old drive when it is assigned to drive D, but after a shutdown it comes back. Any ideas? 

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to help you with that problem.

You can try cleaning the 64 GB eMMC drive with the windows diskpart utility and hope the notebook boots from the NVMe SSD, but if it doesn't you will have to reinstall Windows on the eMMC drive and use the 256 GB M.2 SSD for storage only.

I'm still baffled that you were able to get a NVMe drive to work in your notebook when no one else on this forum that has a 14-fq0xxx notebook with that hardware configuration was able to.

This a typical post regarding the problem.

Solved: Add SSD to HP Laptop 14-fq0040nr - HP Support Community - 8894868

[Ianlee]

Thanks Paul. I was able to boot to a usb drive with cloning software on it. After plugging in the NVMe drive I was able to clone the eMMC.  Residual effect is the Boot problem. I'm convinced this BIOS version is part of the problem. There is no Legacy support. Somehow the eMMC drive seems to have a priority MBR or NTLDR. I'll keep plugging away at it. Thanks again

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome  

Hopefully, you will get it to work.