Hp Stream 7 not booting into OS

[Batleram]

Hello forum readers,

I own a hp stream 7 tablet and I cannot manage to get it to boot into the OS. (Also, the drive is encrypted with bitlocker and I lost the key ).

Here is what happened:

1 - I was using windows 8.1 on the tablet and I wanted to try out windows 10 on it so I downloaded the windows 10 upgrade tool and ran it. Success

2 - When I realized that windows 10 is painfully slow on 1 gb of ram I made a windows 8 install disk on a micro sd card. I put it in the tablet and tried to boot from it. Fail

3 - Since I was locked out of the BIOS for some reason, I installed EasyBCD on the tabled and added an entry for the micro sd card and set it to be the default boot device. 

4 - Trying to boot from the micro sd card again, there was an error message, (probably did not recognize the sd card as a boot device. )

5 - Using a DIY OTG cable I connected a keyboard and mouse to a powered usb hub to navigate to the windwos 10 boot option and I stumbled uppon a bitlocker screen saying there are no more bitlocker recovery options.

That is what happened.

Things i tried.

1 - I found a default BIOS password and changed a bit of the boot orders

2 - Using the OTG cable, I tried to boot from a recovery usb (I tried several) but the tablet does not see it

3 - I tried to reinstate the original BIOS image from the .bin file in the tablet but still won't boot.

4 - I tried to drain the battery thinking it would somehow fix it (I don't know, I was out of ideas).

I went on several forum posts but none came with an answer.

Please help!!!!

[kyle_b]

Unless your BIOS got corrupted, you should be able to boot from a USB.  You might have to disable secure boot in the BIOS.  Note that the Stream 7 cannot boot from the SD card slot, it can only boot from the USB.  Also try another OTG adapter, I have some that do not work on my Stream 7 for some reason. 

To reinstall Windows 8.1, you would need an actual recovery USB for the Stream since it is only licensed for Windows 8.1 with Bing.  The downloadable Windows 8.1 images from Microsoft will install but will not activate.  If you activated Windows 10 when you upgraded,  you would be able to download the install image for Windows 10 and wipe the disk clean and do a fresh install and it will activate.  Make sure you get the 32-bit image.  Many people here are running Windows 10 on the Stream tablet without a problem, the 1 GB of RAM is definitely a limiting factor but it should run okay if you do not open too many things a once.

[Batleram]

Thank you for your answer Kyle, but I got it working using a different powered USB hub minutes ago. For some reason the other USB hub did not see the usb stick 😞 

Thanks again

Batleram