PC won't boot up from USB drive

[Jonathanmoore21]

My PC bricked the other day and said it couldn't find a bios on the hard drive. I went through the usual stuff (checked forums, watched videos) and determined that the best course was to create a recovery USB flash drive and try to reset the PC to factory settings from there. I went to the HP website, used the serial number and product number to find my PC, and downloaded the recovery file. I ran the application, created a recovery USB, and popped it into my PC...exact same response. Black screen saying boot device not found. Tried reordering boot order so that it went to USB first, same result. Tried flash drive on another PC and it reads fine. My non working PC was reading through USB fine before it stopped working as well, so I don't think it's a hardware issue. I tried multiple USB ports as well. Any ideas?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Since your PC's booting is controlled by the Windows boot manager, changing the boot order normally does not do anything.

Have you tried getting to the F9 boot options menu and forcing the PC to boot from the USB flash drive?

To do that, have the flash drive in a USB port.

Turn on or restart the PC.

Immediately press/tap the ESC key to get the menu of options.

Select the F9 boot options menu and from that, select the EFI USB diskette on key/USB hard drive and press the Enter key.

The PC should boot from the USB flash drive.

If you don't see a USB flash drive listed in the F9 boot options menu, go into the BIOS and disable secure boot.

Then see if the flash drive shows up in the boot options menu.

If there is a legacy USB flash drive option, do not boot from that one.

Only boot from the EFI USB flash drive.

If the recovery is successful, you can go back into the BIOS and enable secure boot again.

[Jonathanmoore21]

When I go to boot options, the only choice is boot from EFI file. Then it gives me select a file system option, which has "USB" in the file string. The only option that seems to work there is HP Bios Update. It goes through the whole update process, and then returns back to the couldn't find the bios on the hard drive. Tried with secure boot on, same result. Any ideas?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Unfortunately, I don't.

The PC should be seeing a USB flash drive with secure boot disabled.

Try this which is the only other idea I can come up with...download the W10 ISO file from the link below, not the USB flash drive creation.

Download Windows 10 (microsoft.com)

Use the free Rufus utility to transfer the ISO file to a USB flash drive so that it is bootable.

Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

Set up the Rufus menu as you see it in the illustration for creating Windows bootable media.

That loads an EFI file when the flash drive tries to boot.