HP Envy x360 Laptop - 3F0 error at boot just started occuring. Hard drive passes HP tests.

[anonymousmi]

2 days ago the laptop was turned off but when turned on again immediately displays 3FO error - No Boot Device found.  After much searching and reviewing posts in this HP forum it is clear there is no easy solution.  Especially once I found out this is related to Intel Optane. 

Laptop refuses to boot from any external devices like USB sticks or CDs.  Was at least hoping to be able to see the drive from say a Windows Recovery DOS prompt, etc.  But this laptop is from 2019 and has no Windows Recovery partition, HP Cloud recovery is not supported for this model Envy either. 

The drive passes the Quick and Extended BIOS tests, all other tests are fine except Storage.

Looking into the BIOS further can see it is an Intel Optane drive versus models which had an Optance cache chip on the motherboard.  There is an option to convert it to Non-Optane but the BIOS indicates that will erase the drive.  Also see that it is marked as Disabled so that is why it is not visible to the laptop itself apparently.  This is an INTEL_HBRPEKNX0202AH drive:  Intel Optane Memory H10 32GB with SSD Solid State Storage 512GB HBRPEKNX0202A M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4.

There is no way to use the Intel SRT Windows application to disable Optane supposedly safely to copy the cached data back to the drive.  Looking at other posts here, even removing the drive will not help because it will not be mountable, was hoping to at least be able to recover data from it.  Unfortunately do not have a backup - I know that is not good.  But this has worked fine for 6 years and all of sudden no longer boots and traditional recovery methods are not an option due to Optane.  HP Support refuses to transfer to a live person to discuss so only option is to pay my own $$$ to fix a clear Intel/HP issue or to post here.

So even if I were to take this to an HP Support Center what would they do?  Replace the drive certainly.  Need to be able to recover the drive data somehow, sure I see similar Optane drives for sale however would prefer to stay away from Optane, modern SSDs are much faster than from 2019.   However, there is no recovery media, no HP Cloud recovery is available, if there is a Windows Recovery Partition it is not accessible because the drive is disabled - which makes me wonder how the BIOS test even passed the drive testing.

I have not seen posts here or elsewhere where there has been a successful recovery from this situation (other than when backup data is available), so looking for suggestions (I understand of course this is why backups are important so let this be another lesson to others and myself) but I had no idea drives with Optane would be this difficult to deal with for recovery options.

[banhien]

@anonymousmi 

Please use the following Guide

                   HP PCs - Hard disk 3F0 boot device not found error

Regards.

[anonymousmi]

Thanks for the suggestion @Banhien, while I didn’t explicitly mention that guide I was able to both reset and update the BIOS with no effect on the hard drive issue.  I did mention the BIOS tests all passed, both types of the hard drive test and other components,  Cannot install Windows or anything else because the drive is disabled in the BIOS.  There seems no be no option to enable it in the BIOS and I have no way to run the Intel software as that requires Windows.   I am trying to save converting it to a non-Optane drive to a final option, as that route erases all drive data.  Extremely frustrating.

[anonymousmi]

Reviewing the link you sent @Banhien, there was a link at the bottom of the page for when no drive is found.  Following those instructions I made a boot USB with Windows 10 (Media Creation Tool) and copied the Intel RST driver from HP to the USB drive too.  This time the laptop did boot from the USB and I first tried to go to a DOS prompt to see what drives were visible:

So the C drive is the H10 Optane drive, but clearly without the Intel RST driver being available to DOS it reports the C drive is corrupted and unreadable.

I then started the installation process to get the screen where I can Load Drivers, I selected the F6 folder in the driver folders copied to the USB drive.  It displayed 2 drivers:

but no matter which one I selected the loading screen just spins, the green progress bar at the bottom just keeps filling and starting over but never completes loading either driver.  

Welcome any thoughts on why the drivers will not load, as this seems to be needed if I even want to try to reinstall Windows on this drive.

However I did find this encouraging that there might be a way to copy the data off the Intel H10 drive to access from a different PC, so I searched and found this article:

https://www.elevenforum.com/t/using-nvme-optane-drive-in-usb-enclosure.13323/

The last post there contained a link to a UGreen External USB enclosure that the poster used to successfully access data from an Optane drive from an HP Spectre X360.  So I should receive that enclosure today.  So my thinking is I do have another PC running Windows 10 and I installed the Intel Optane Memory and Storage Application with the hope it will be able to perform these steps on the drive to make it accessible after writing any Optane cache data back to the drive so it can be accessed as a regular drive:

1. Open the application.
2. Click on the Intel® Optane™ Memory tab on the left.
3. Click Disable.
4. Confirm that you want to disable acceleration by clicking the Disable button. The disabling process will start.
5. Once complete, click Restart