Notebook Hardware and Upgrade Questions

Hi there! I have a laptop, a HP Pavilion Gaming 15-ec2008ca, that I unintentionally broke the screen on, so I decided that I might as well repurpose it as a simple transcoding server for my media collection.

The problem is, I decided to throw away the screen and just leave the laptop as a "halftop", so there's no longer a screen installed. Because of this, I can't boot into Linux, Windows, Debian, or any other operating system. Since I wasn't sure why exactly it wasn't booting, I decided to create a BIOS recovery USB and boot it off of that. However, my system's now stuck in the BIOS recovery mode. After looking around on the recovery USB, I found a file named "HpBiosUpdate.log", and it's full of entries like the following:

2020-01-01 00:15:56 EFI HP BIOS Update 3.9.4.0 Started
2020-01-01 00:15:56 [L]> System ID: 88DD
2020-01-01 00:15:56 HP BIOS Image Interface Protocol 2 Version 2.0
2020-01-01 00:15:56 [L]> EFI_HP_BATTERY_CONTROL_PROTOCOL_2010 is present.
2020-01-01 00:15:56 Type 11 1 tables
2020-01-01 00:15:56 Type (000000000000000Bh), Len (0000000000000005h), Handle (0000000000000007h), String count (000000000000000Dh)
2020-01-01 00:15:56 HPBATDET: Environment Variable not found.
2020-01-01 00:15:56 BATDET: Date 1//23//2021 
2020-01-01 00:15:56 BATDET: 0
2020-01-01 00:15:56 [L]> BATDET: HP
2020-01-01 00:15:56 [L]> Found 1 Absolute Pointer Protocol(s)
2020-01-01 00:15:56 [E]> failed to SetBestGopMode, Not Found
2020-01-01 00:15:56 Failed Init of Graphics Library

Is there any way I can at least get an operating system running somehow without a display attached? I did try multiple methods to escape the BIOS recovery loop, including:

1. Pressing Win-V while turning on the device to clear the BIOS settings
2. Pressing Win-B again to try and force the BIOS update to run
3. Holding the power button for 10 seconds to reset the embedded controller
4. Unplugging and plugging back in the internal battery
5. Connecting a display to the HDMI port
6. Connecting a display to a USB-C dongle and connecting that to the laptop
7. Connecting a screen with a similar connector (HP Envy 13)

Although I'm aware this is an unsupported configuration, I hope I can at least find a solution so this doesn't have to go into the scrap heap. Thank you!