Problem Rebooting My Notebook

[goodbotz]

I recently said yes to a prompt to upgrade my factory Win10 to the 'latest version'. This serious process took about an hour. Afterwards, I soon realized that my preferred file manager "Directory Opus" would no longer load or start.  So I went about to uninstall and then reinstall this program. 

At the conclusion of the uninstall, the process advised me that I'd need to do a reboot to complete the uninstallation... did I want to do this now?  I said yes, and the system reboot process initiated. After about a minute or two, a screen came up advising "Rebooting now, please stand by". 

So far, the machine was quiet up to this point. About 30 seconds after the (now static) display of this rebooting message, the system fans started up... in 30 seconds or so, they were screaming at full force. I tolerated this situation for about 3 minutes, then I pressed the power button (front top side, upper left hand corner). The machine turned off as expected. 

When I tried to restart the machine via pressing the power switch, I'm presented a back-lit black screen (no text or logo/graphics at all), it's quiet for 30 seconds, then the fans start up, 30 seconds later they're screaming at full force, and things stay like this until my patience expires and I again press the power button to turn the machine off. 

I contacted chat support.  They recommended that I try disconnecting the wall power and the battery... waiting 5 minutes or so... reconnecting everything back and trying to do a power-on reboot from this point. (This ZBook G4 seems to be designed to be a "corporate" machine where the person using-it/possessing-it is not the 'owner' - they've made removing the back panel to get to the battery, the ram, the expansion HD and m3 slots very difficult... you need to remove 9 small "torx" type screws.) 

While I had the back off and the HP chat team online... I asked the support person whether there was a hardware 'reset' switch on the exposed motherboard. He looked into it and said no.  In the old days, all MB's had such hard reset switches that shorted out any MB capacitors holding session config values - forcing the OS to subsequently reload factory default values for these on the next reboot.  No such luck here on this MB.

After 10 minutes, I put everything back together. Unfortunately, the boot process to the black screen and screaming fans was exactly the same.  Disconnecting the battery for 10 minutes was not sufficient to force the boot process to lose the earlier session config values and reload the factory default boot values.

At this point (without  any info on how to short out any capacitors behind maintaining these previous session config values in memory somewhere on this MB), my thought is to repeat this same wall-power-disconnect/battery-removed rountine... but this time wait for a day... or two... hoping the earlier session config values will eventually disappear with the dissapation of the capacitor charges... and then I can hopefully reboot with the process finally then loading the default factory config values.

Anyone have any better idea?

[Dudefoxlive]

there is a backup Battery installed on the keyboard side of the motherboard so removing the battery for 10 minuets is not going to clean the BIOS of the machine.  You would have to remove the Primary battery and then remove the motherboard completely and then remove the BIOS backup battery and wait about 10 minuets for the BIOS to clear completely.  You can also try a BIOS recovery by hold "Windows Key + B" to see if it can revert the BIOS to an earilier version.  This may also set the BIOS to factory settings.  Have you tried to see if you can even get into the BIOS by pressing F10 on startup?  

[goodbotz]

Hi Dudefoxlive:

Wow! Windows Key + B reverts to an earlier BIOS version?!?  Do you mean an earlier BIOS configuration? In any case... I have that machine down now so I can't test this idea.  

Your point about there being a bios backup battery... on the other side of the MB... can only make me laugh.  So... it looks that in order to do a hard reboot of this machine, a typical user needs to purchase the correct sized torx bit, remove the 9 torx screws on the rear, disconnect the battery... remove many components (possibly including the CPU and fan assembly), then remove the motherboard, find the lead to/from the bios backup battery... disconnect this... wait a few minutes... reconnect it... re-install the MB, re-install all the several components earlier removed, reconnect the main battery lead, put the rear case back on (via the nine small torx screws), then try the power-on button again.

Do you think my doing this might in any way affect my factory warranty coverage?  IF I'm successful, maybe I can get a freelance "gig" type job with HP performing this same maneuver on other people's Zbook G4 15's sent into HP repair to get a hard boot performed?

Ha-ha!!

I'm sure I can handle this suggested MB removal/replacement work over here... but this is a brand new $2k machine I just received from the factory.  Is this a reasonably required process to effect a hard reboot on this (or any other) notebook?  Is this a very serious design deficiency ?

[goodbotz]

Sorry - I forgot to answer/reply that none of the standard keyboard boot/bios sequences work when the screen is black with no text or prompts of any sort... the keyboard does not appear to be responsive at all...

[Dudefoxlive]

I am unsure about the warrenty because i dont work for HP but from what i have heard no i dont think this will affect the warrenty.  At this point i would see about claiming this machine as a warrenty before removing the BIOS battery to save your warrenty from being voided if it does.

[goodbotz · Accepted solution]

Through several phone calls through several HP support call centers around the world... I finally ascertained the direct-to phone number for business-grade support for HP Zbooks (and in the US to boot!)... Called and was connected to tech "Ziggy", who knew this machine very well.  

(THere's an interesting aside I need to mention here - If you followed my blah-blah above... I was last going to leave the machine with the main battery unplugged for a day or two in an attempt to force the bios to lose its present/stuck config and to load the factory default config to boot... another helpful person pointed out that this approach most likely wouldn't work due to the fact that the bios has its very own 'config preservation' battery on the rear side of the motherboard.  So... my main battery was disconnected for only about 6 hours. When my calling for help turned up this promising US-based tech support center for this precise model... I realized I'd have to have  the  machine ready for the call. I plugged it into the wall power (with the internal battery still unplugged),  pressed the power button... and Presto! The Win10 OS booted normally!  Somehow this 6 hours of no power succeeded in clearing out the corrupted bios image, and enabled the reloading of either the last good bios config or the factory default bios config on the next boot attempt. So this solved my present pressing problem... but moving forward... would I need to repeat this "open the back of the case, detach the main battery cable, close the back of the case, wait 6 hours, attach wall power, attempt to boot, if successful, shut down, remove wall power, open back of case, reattach main battery cable, close back of case, attach wall power, press power button to boot" routine over and over again as needed to fix my booting challenges in the future??)

So I told Ziggy this story, and he offered two keyboard sequence routines to also try to escape this fate in the future: One was mentioned above... during the boot sequence (at some point) try the Windows Button + the "B" key... the other key sequence is , again at some point in the boot-up process, press and hold down both the power button and the speaker mute button  (on the two opposite left/right corners) simultaneously for about 1 minute.  Obviously between these two options... the Win+B is the less-serious one and the first to try... the two-key power+mute buttons down for one minute is the much more serious solution and should only be attempted where the easier option doesn't work. Each of these alter the  present (supposedly corrupted) bios config values... the easier one returns the config set to the last/previously known good set... the two-key/one-minute move returns the config set to the factory default (minimum values, etc) values.

I haven't tried either of these two options myself yet (as my 6 hour wait also did the fix magic for me), but I'm at least relieved that it looks like I have a boot recovery option that doesn't require me to completely disassemble the machine and remove the motherboard to locate the bios back-up battery lead... What a relief!  Ha-ha!!

[Dudefoxlive]

At least you got the machine working 🙂