HP Pavilion 15-n274ca will ONLY boot Linux based Operating Systems (No Windows 10 or Win10PE)

[JadenAsh]

This is the strangest thing I have ever seen. Trying to fix an HP Pavilion 15-n274ca for someone who couldn't boot into Windows 10. It would boot to the HP loading screen and then the "Starting Automatic Repair" message would appear, but afterwards it would merely display a black screen. I tried booting from a USB thumb drive that has some utilities on it (Medicat Win 10) which is Win10PE based,  but it would also hang on a black screen and go no further. Tried multiple bootable USB drives, all of which had the same issue. I made sure that UEFI was enabled and tried toggling secure boot with no change. I then tried burning a copy of Windows 10 to a DVD since this laptop has a DVD drive, but ran into the same issue again. Tried flashing the BIOS from an HP 3-in-1 utility disk and was successful. This was the first bootable drive I got to successfully boot. With the BIOS flashed, the issue persisted however. Tried flashing to a more up to date BIOS version but still no change. Tried dissembling the entire laptop to swap out the CMOS battery, but this also did not change the situation. 

Then for the hell of it, I popped in a copy of Medicat USB, which is a menu based version of Medicat which uses grub as a bootloader as it is Linux based and it successfully booted. I then tried running windows 10 recovery from the menu in Medicat and ran into the same issue with the black screen (Win 10 recovery is based on Win10PE). I then loaded up Medicat again and noticed a "boot to Lubuntu" option so I attempted this and it also booted successfully to the Lubuntu desktop. 

So apparently this machine hates Windows? Any ideas? 

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I have restored to defaults multiple times. Also, I'm having troubles reconnecting either antenna to the wifi card. 

[IT_WinSec · Accepted solution]

Hello @JadenAsh 

I would recommend that you fully format the HDD/storage drive on this PC using some software like GPart/GParted. You may download and boot from Lubuntu and do it from there.

Ensure the BIOS is set to Legacy mode (CSM) enable, Secure boot disabled

Create a bootable Windows 10 media (USB bootable drive) using the Media Creation tool

Try to boot from it using F9 option

Refer to the attached PDF file below, please

[JadenAsh]

Okay, got everything up and running. Didn't bother with disabling secure boot or legacy mode, but managed to boot to Lubuntu and delete just the Windows partitions and that did the trick. Seems the Windows partitions were so heavily corrupted that nothing else would boot but Linux. 

Also, when disassembling the computer, I noticed that the hard drive was replaced since the last time I worked on the machine and was installed incorrectly. There was no spacer bracket or enclosure for the hard drive and it was just attached to the cable and being held in place only by the USB/Audio cable. It was touching bare metal on the bottom of the unit and moving back and shifting back and forth inside of the laptop. This likely caused a short or the hard drive took a bump at the wrong time. It seems like the drive is okay, but there are some smart warnings that accumulated probably from when the drive was malfunctioning. SMART test does pass however. I zero'ed out the drive, formatted it and reinstalled Windows and everything seems to be running smoothly. 

Thank you very much!

[IT_WinSec]

You are most welcome ! 😉

God Bless all these guys involved in Linux and the free open source software. There are things which only Linux-based software can fix.