Laptop won't turn on - HP EliteBook 645 G9

[CraigMac120]

Laptop won't turn on and I get 7 white blinking lights on the Caps Lock key. I don't know what this means. Does anyone know what this means?

[Jupitero]

Hello.

Take a look at the HP Blink Code support page. Did it help?

[CraigMac120]

Hi Jupitero,

I am unable to find the exact beep code that's happening on my laptop. The caps lock key blinks 7 time, which a appears to be long blinks and the light of the key is white not red. In addition, the power light is constantly turned on.  

Don't know what this means. I can't find the exact sequence on the link you provided: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_1997210-1528385-16

Please help if you can. 

Thank you in advance!

CL

[Jupitero]

Hello.

"On systems that do not have a dual-color light, both long and short blinks are white".

HP has in instructional video showing different light codes. Short blinks are noticeably quicker, so probably not the case.

Seven blinks in Elitebook/ZBook laptops mean "Sure Start unable to find valid BIOS Boot Block image". This possibly being the case, I recommend trying the procedure in this HP video to recover the BIOS. The recovery procedure expects a working hard drive and the (hidden) EFI partition to have a working BIOS version stored there. If you are using the HP factory installed Windows as a base (even after upgrade to Win11), or have ever updated the laptop BIOS in Windows, it will have saved the current and previous BIOS version there, so this should work.

You can also create a bootable USB key on another machine for a BIOS restore. In that case, run the BIOS update softpaq on another computer and create a USB key there. Insert the USB key to your 645 G9 and using the same recovery steps as above, your laptop should restore the BIOS from USB.

[TzortzisG]

HP PC Commercial BIOS (UEFI) Setup 2020-2023 

This means that the BIOS has been corrupted (usually by a botched Windows Update Firmware upgrade) or/and the BIOS chip has gone bad. Since this is a new machine, statistically speaking I would bet that this is just a BIOS corruption. Unfortunately post-G8 business models have very complicated UEFI firmware that -when corrupted- doesn't really allow for any of the older rescue heroics (mentioned above) to actually work. Therefore:

1) If this laptop is still with an active warranty (many G9s come with 3yrs) it should be taken to an authorized HP Service center, where it will most likely get a motherboard replacement.

2) If the warranty has ended, external flashing of the BIOS chip is necessary (in almost all cases). This can either be performed at a non-HP chip level repair facility....or for anyone brave (and experienced) enough there are DIY solutions. There have been successful reports of the latter even here on the HP forum.