17t-cn000 CT02: BIOS update from USB

[LarryF58]

Hi. I'm a computer repairman in Missouri and usually don't have this kind of problem. But I'm scratching my head over this one. The computer is a 17t-cn000 CT02 and has an 11th gen i5. The current BIOS is listed as AMI BIOS F.20 version 2.2.8.0.

This started with a customer with a computer that was non-bootable due to having completely jacked up their MS account. It was so bad that Windows needed to be recovered. But then the problems really started. I went into the recovery environment and couldn't reset because of the messed up MS account preventing it.

So I tried reinstalling Windows from a USB drive. Then I found out that the Windows install couldn't detect the drive. I then downloaded hard disk drivers from HP and tried to get the Windows installer to use them. The install media said that a compatible driver wasn't in the folder. Assuming that maybe the BIOS was just not working right, I next tried updating the BIOS. But I can't.

The HP instructions for a BIOS update say to find the update section in BIOS and select the option to check for an update. There isn't an update option in BIOS. I downloaded the BIOS update from HP and installed it on a USB drive. The instructions said to use the ESC key to get into the start menu and F2 to get into the hardware diagnostics. There I was supposed to find and select the BIOS/firmware option. There isn't any such option in that menu.

The USB drive doesn't have a way to boot into a BIOS recovery mode, so I'm stuck. I've searched everywhere, but can't find specific instructions for this computer and it doesn't have any of the tools it's supposed to. Help please?

[LarryF58]

As an experiment, I installed Lubuntu on the system. It went in without a single complaint. So whatever is going on, it's a Windows thing.

That still leaves me with the problem of "what do I do when the Windows installation process can't detect the hard drive and the HP hard disk drivers are rejected?"

Having not gotten a reply after a week, I decided to install Ubuntu Linux in place of Lubuntu and go with that. The only program the end user needs has a web version they can log into, so compatibility isn't an issue. I'd still like to know what the solution to this problem is, though. I tried mounting the drive into a different computer and installing Windows that way, only for it to fail when I put the drive back into the customer's system. Again, it was a problem with Windows detecting the hard drive. It makes me wonder how HP got Windows on that computer in the first place.