Mother struggling with random Boot Device Not Found

[My_old_mother]

Asking on behalf of my elderly, technology-challenged mother...

Windows 10 laptop, purchased 1 year ago. Occasionally, seems to be while watching BBC iPlayer, her laptop freezes, tells her it will re-start, and then she gets the error screen:

"Boot Device Not Found

Please install an operating system on your hard disk.

Hard Disk (3F0)"

I am restricted to trying to help her over the phone. I get her to reboot and everything works fine for a few weeks until it happens again (e.g. 30th June, then 23rd August).

Some of the online advice I've found about this seems to be where the problem happens continually.  Does it make sense for this particular problem to be occurring apparently randomly?  I'd like to narrow down the possible solutions if I can, as it will be a challenge to talk her through it remotely.

[WAWood]

@My_old_mother 

Hey, I understand the situation -- really!  I'm a former IT guy and I provide remote and onsite assistance for lots of folks -- and that is really, really hard to do remotely even though I have remote login enabled on their PCs.

My GUESS here, and it is a GUESS, is that when she is doing the video streaming, that is taxing her PC resources and it then gets overwhelmed and freezes up.  That could be corrupting the Windows filesystem in the process.  So, when she reboots, it has difficulties reading the BCD and thinks the drive is missing.

What I don't get is why simply rebooting following your directions then fixes this.  When I've run into this, I've had to drive over there any use my USB sticks to repair/rebuild the BCD so the PC will boot again.

One person I support regularly does HD streaming using the HP laptop which has 4GB of memory and a 4-core processor, and in watching that work, it regularly bumps up against 100% CPU usage and can freeze up.  I upgraded their memory to 8GB and that seemed to have stopped the freezing issue, although the process still maxes out.

Does this model PC have an SSD or does it still use an HDD?  I also replaced the HDD in that laptop with an SDD and that also served to solve the freezing issues.

Also,  this 3F0 issue is often due to a failing drive.

If your PC is new enough to support UEFI, you can use these steps to test the hard drive: http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c00439024

If not, to check the drive you have to follow these steps:
1) Press Esc key repeatedly, several times a second, while rebooting the laptop. Do NOT hold the key down, just press it over and over.
2) Eventually, you will see an HP Startup Menu
3) Press the Function key for testing the hard drive (usually F2) and let it run.

[My_old_mother]

Hey, thank you for taking the time to write a detailed response.

I confirm it's HDD.

Following the link and getting the BIOS SetUp Menu - the options were Main / Security / System Configuration. It didn't have a Diagnostics or Tools menu, and nothing like them in the sub-menus either.

Using your steps for the HP StartUp Menu - we couldn't find an option specifically to test the hard drive, but found a System Test. We ran the "Fast Test" and it passed.  (My mother read out that it said "testing hard drive SSD" at one point - I did get her to double check via the defrag tool that she has HDD though).

So - nothing came up in that particular test.  She watches iPlayer almost every day and the majority of times has no issue.  And yes, when it crashes a simple reboot fixes it - until it happens again.