Well crap.

[overpowered]

HP Envy laptop gets some sort of corruption in the boot sequence. Won't boot. Get the color logos and then black.

Some Googling suggests use Testdisk to fix it. Ultimate Boot CD has it. Yay!

Not yay.

Laptop won't even try to boot UBCD. Boot crappy old Linux box that barely runs with UBCD? Sure. Works fine.

Maybe the BIOS is set wrong. Nope. Looks good. Laptop even boots with HP recovery disk which only wants to reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS.

Try putting UBCD on DVD-R. Nope.

Try putting UBCD on a flash drive. Nope.

The laptop clearly does not like UBCD.

I got so desperate, I tried to make a boot floppy (I've got a USB floppy drive and the laptop will boot from it) but the only one I've been able to make that booted is FreeDOS and it the DOS/Win95 version of TestDisk does not like FreeDOS.

I want to punch something.

[Yw-slayer]

Send it back to HP?

[thesameguy]

Is secure boot on? Is legacy boot enabled? Is it set to UEFI boot? What OS are you running? I can't speak for HP, but Dell has a pretty kickass "fix boot problems" bootable environment - maybe HP does too?

[Yw-slayer]

Also maybe next time use a more descriptive thread title rather than doing it fud-style. Lol

[overpowered]

Is secure boot on? Is legacy boot enabled? Is it set to UEFI boot? What OS are you running? I can't speak for HP, but Dell has a pretty kickass "fix boot problems" bootable environment - maybe HP does too?

I don't see any option called "secure boot".

The BIOS security page only has admin password and power-on password which are both set to <Clear>

The System Configuration page has a Boot Options menu but that only has the POST Hotkey delay and the boot devices allowed and the boot order.

I was running Windows 7.

[thesameguy]

What happens when you remove all the entries from the Boot order except, say, the CD drive?

[overpowered]

It won't allow me to remove the hard drive from the order.

I can disable boot from CD, floppy and network.

I cannot disable USB Diskette on Key/USB Hard Disk or Notebook Hard Drive which are in the boot order. I have Notebook Hard Drive last among permitted boot devices. CD is first.

Again, it boots from CD/DVD if the CD/DVD is the HP recovery disc.

[thesameguy]

Did this laptop originally have 8 or 10 on it? It really sounds like UEFI and/or SecureBoot is enabled. Everything you've described is consistent with that. I don't know what the key is on an Envy, but usually there is an F-key you can hit on POST to select an alternative boot device. On many computers it's F8 or F12. Once there, you should have an option to switch from UEFI boot to legacy boot, then it'll reboot, hit Fx again, and choose the USB drive. I have not worked on any HP in the last 3-4 years (since UEFI etc.) so I can't comment on BIOS layout, but I really think that's what you're facing.

[thesameguy]

Also, WRT to the original problem, can you get into Windows in safe mode?

[thesameguy]

Also this:

http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03653226



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