HP 250 G5 black screen on Intel HD Video driver install

[fu510n]

Hi, I have a problem with 3 x HP 250 G5 notebooks, all identical product W5T31PT.  All 3 have Intel Celeron N3060 cpu (braswell) and 4GB RAM.  All 3 are in perfect working condition hardware-wise except missing/dead hard drive and are recently out of warranty.  I replaced 2 hard drives with brand new same size, and 1 with a SSD.  I would prefer to restore the factory partitions on the new drives, but my nearest HP service centre is over 1000KM away, and I cant afford to order a DVD/USB recovery kit at this point in time.  So I thought that's OK, I will just install fresh retail windows on them since I own copies of Windows 7, 8.1 and 10, and download the appropriate drivers from the hp support website and/or device manufacturer websites.  I have no problem installing or booting windows on them, everything works as expected and all drivers install and function correctly, except for the video drivers.  I can not get any Intel HD Video drivers to properly complete installation on all 3 laptops, on all 3 versions of Windows.  I have been troubleshooting this problem around 12-14 hours per day for most days during the last 5 weeks, I have read hundreds of posts on countless forums from people having similar problems with this same laptop, and same or similar-chipset laptops and desktops, but none of them quite match the issue I am facing, and none of the many posted solutions that worked for others have worked for me, so I have decided to seek assistance here.  Apologies for such a long post, but i would like to describe the issue clearly and list all troubleshooting steps I have tried in 1 shot, to try and prevent  lengthy sessions of unnecessary back and forth ping-pong or circular discussions, and to see if somebody can offer any ideas that I havent already tried, as I am almost out of things to try.  Detailed description of the problem --  On Windows 7 the driver installs successfully and requests a reboot, but upon rebooting it gets stuck at a black screen, and on Windows 8.1 and 10 it gives the same black screen at what looks like 3/4 way through driver installation - the screen rapidly changes video modes twice then instantly freezes the laptop on black screen.  On all 3 Windows versions, after rapidly installing the intel DisplayAudio driver, the HD video driver installer takes an abnormally long time to get to reach the 'switching video mode' phase of the driver installation process - around 140 seconds.  On Windows 7 and 8.1 after the Windows boot logo, just at the spot you would expect to see the windows logon screen is where the screen goes black and they are permanently unable to boot normally and require reinstallation, but safe mode boots fine, where as windows 10 reverts to the Microsoft Basic Display driver every time.  The black screen is not pitch black, it's that extremely dark grey when an LCD is showing a pure black image at maximum screen brightness.  When the black screen occurs, the cpu fan is on, the caps lock key is lit, and the white 'power on' light on the right side is on, but thee is no other sign of life whatsoever, it does not respond to ctr+alt+del, its hardlock frozen and I have to hold down the power button for 5 seconds.  Steps I have tried to resolve the issue--  I have tried leaving it sit on the black screen overnight many times.  I have reset the cmos settings, updated to the latest bios version, took out the battery and discharged the power sevral times, several days apart, tried different cmos settings with virtualisation off, different internal devices disabled or hidden.  I have tried uncountable clean installations (reformat) of windows 7 RTM, Windows 7 SP1 (latest media refresh), Windows 8.1 (latest media refresh), Windows 10 Build 1501, and Windows 10 Build 1809, all direct ISO images download from microsoft and MD5 hashes verified, x64 versions.  I have downloaded all listed drivers (not just Intel HD Video) from the official HP 250 G5 download page for both windows 7 x64 and windowsx 10 x64, plus more than 100 different Intel HD driver installer packages and zip packages for the Celeron N3060 and other broadwell CPU's, for other HP, lenovo, dell, acer, asus and other similar laptops and desktops, from various sources, including other manufacturer websites and links from the aforementioned help forums and other websites, from the latest available drivers and dating back several years.  I have tediously tried all relevant combinations of these drivers on all the above Windows'.  I have tried numerous manual installation methods for most of these drivers, including different versions of dpinst64, on windows 7 sp1, windows 8.1 and windows 10 v1809, then repeated this process with setting all intel power profile entries to 'maximum performance' in the igdlh64.inf file and rebooted with driver signature enforcement off.  I have tried with and without different sets of chipset and other device drivers being installed or using windows defaults ones.  I have tried pre-creating all possible registry entries to try and avoid any of the known causes of these types of issues relatng to intel power profiles and Intel DPST.  I have tried every suggestion from any forum I could find.  I have tried varios custom modded drivers, aswell as driver 'frankenbuilds' i created.  I have tried installing the drivers with the charger plugged in and out, I have tried swapping RAM modules, I have tried countless windows power profiles and settings combinastions, including custom power profiles.  I have tried integrating many versions of the drivers into the windows installation media using dism, and I have also tried integrating the drivers post install using dism.  I have tried alternative windows installation methods such as applying the wim images using dism, again, with and wothout varying versoins of the drivers integrated.  I am racking my brains here trying to figure out whats going on here.  I have tried running the installers from various different drives.  I have tried right-click run as admin and varying compatibility options from the .exe properties tab.  I strongly doubt that all 3 machines have the same hardware fault without any other sign of problem, big or small.  I ran several hardware test suites, no issues found in any category.  I honestly I cant even rememer half of the other things i tried, but I would remeber if i thought about it long enough or if people metion them.  I think thats enough for now.  Any constructive input from anybody would be very, very much appreciated  Also if anybody who owns this HP model is willing to upload a backup of their factory reset partition/s, that would probably be instant problem solved 🙂

[fu510n]

Update:

I also have currently have 7X  HP 250 G6's also in my possession and they too suffer the identical problem as my 3x G5's.

This is very frustrating and makes me strongly dislike HP products.

Can someone from HP support please:

1. Shed some light on which strange and unnecessary modifications yous did to make both these laptop series unable to install any video drivers from Intel or the official HP drivers for any operating system.

2. Kindly inform me how to resolve this ridiculous issue.