Boot Device Not Found (3F0), Cant fix with diagnostic or cloud recovery, x360 15t-df100

[Synephrine]

Spectre x360 - 15t notebook specs:

i7-9750H @ 2.60GHz

16 GB memory

1 TB Intel SSD + 32 GB Intel Optane memory

Windows 10 Home 64 ADV

GTX 1650

I'm at a loss to recover my x360 notebook back into windows, 10 64bit purchased in Dec 2019.  Unfortunately, the 1 year warranty has expired, but note this laptop is hardly ever used, and probably has less than 50 hours of use.

Anyway, 3F0 error is consistent.  This started the other day when I was surfing the net and the screen went blank.  Plugged the laptop into an AC and restarted.  3F0 message appeared and is continuous following each of my troubleshooting step  reboots.  1st steps I tried going through the diagnostics menu:

Boot into F2 Diagnostics UEFI.  Says current version 2.0.2.0 - BIOS

-Hard Drive Check test:  

Quick check - SMART check & Short DST pass

Extensive check - SMART check and Long DST pass

Reboot results in 3F0 following each of the above tests

Additional diagnostics run just to be thorough:

-System Board Test:

PCI Read Device - pass

Memory - pass (15.7 GB)

Onboard Video - pass

Audio - pass

USB - pass

-Memory test:

Memory Quick Check - pass

-Battery Test + Processor check tests - pass

Next steps in BIOS rev (F.23):

-Because I have optane memory, I ensured that Legacy Support was disabled (It was already disabled by default).

- I checked the Intel Rapid Storage Technology to verified BIOS was seeing my memory as optane.  It did:

"Optane Volume: Incomplete Optane Volume"

"Non-RAID Physical Disks: ____" (Blank)

From here I created a HP Cloud recovery Tool on a 32G USB Stick through the HP website.  Download was successful and after uncompressing I received a message that the recovery tool was created successfully and ready for use.  When rebooting the notebook via ESC, then F9 Boot Device Options, then picking the USP recovery stick, black sceen will flash a blue screen for a second, then go back to black.  This happens 3 times then halts with a message saying "Error, Get failure from Dynamic Recovery Tool".  So I did not even get into the recovery tool menus.

As a last resort, I wanted to ensure that a hard reset may not have been working by the power button so I needed to disconnect the battery.  I opened the laptop to disconnect the battery and drain any residual charge by holding the power button several times.  While in there, I also checked to see if the SSD may need to be reseated.  SSD (P/N L48339-001 32GB Optane / 1024 GB NAND).  I also took a look around to see if there were any burns on the board or on the SSD.  Everything honestly looks brand new.  So reassembled and rebooted with fingers crossed.  I had a message come up that the CMOS was reset, and then I was back at the 3F0 message.

Looking for any additional things I could try to fix the notebook.  Right now, this has me leaning towards the SSD being the problem, but I am not sure since the F2 Hard Drive diagnostic test passes.  Any advice would be appreciated.

[iomare]

Hi, 

I would try performing a clean install with a bootable USB windows 10 drive, You can create here on different PC

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

In my opinion it could be that the  Intel Optane cache configuration somehow failed, leaving the OS in an incomplete form.

https://support.hp.com/it-it/document/c05591811

Hope it helps,

David

[Synephrine]

Thanks David.  I was hoping I could use the cloud recovery tool to try and recover info on the drive.  It's not critical though.

Before I go ahead with a clean Win10 install, do you have any thoughts on the RST optane config in the BIOS?  Do I need to reset the volume to non-optane 1st, or is this not necessary with a clean Win install?

Thanks again.

[Synephrine]

Hi David,

I went with your suggestion to do a clean Win10 install from a USB.  During the install, there is a popup showing the drive several partitions.  So I formatted here to be all unallocated space.  On the same screen, there is option to 'load driver'.  I picked this and installed the RSTD F6 driver I downloaded from HP site from a USB stick.  Windows install went fine from there.

My only remaining issue is that The drive is no longer seen as an optane drive.  I thought the F6 driver would take care of that, but it did not work out.  After Windows install, looking in BOIS RST settings, it sees the SSD, but it does nor recognize it as an optane drive.  It's listed as a non-RAID physical drive.  There are no options here to enable or disable optane.

I also tried to to view the SSD through the Intel Optane Memory and Storage Management app.  In the app under the optane memory tab, it says "There are no valid disk pairs in your system"

^So my question here, is does this mean there could be an issue in the BIOS where it is not seeing it as optane, so it's not giving me the option to enable / disable it there?  Or also I've read that you should disable the SSD when removing an optane SSD for example.  Is it possible that the SSD still has infomration on it and considers itself still 'paired' to my previous install before it was reformatted?  Maybe during the drive formatting, that did not unpair the SSD from the opt. memory portion?