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I have an HP Z840 running Ubuntu 18.04. I recently rebooted the machine after having some issues writing to the main HD and now I get a “BootDevice not found” and hard drive 3F0 error. I tried to boot with a USB and a Ubuntu iso image so that I can at least try to recover some files, but that just leads me to a black screen with a blinking underscore.

I suspect that the machine has some issue with a HD, but that shouldn't prevent me from booting with a USB, right?

At this point, I'm kind of stuck so any help would be greatly appreciated!

ModalBro
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    HP systems are finnicky with USB boot - you need to make sure the stick is formatted in the right way and booted the right way. I have that problem with my Z400 workstation here as well, took me having to create a DVD-ROM and installing a DVD drive to boot the Z400 with a USB. As for your Hard Drive problem, reboot after issues writing and then getting a hard drive error means the hard drive is bad. – Thomas Ward Mar 12 '21 at 20:39
  • @ThomasWard: You're right about the finnicky-ness. I just messed around with some setting and finally got it to boot from the USB. I'm gonna stick my files on an external HD if I can, but do you have any advice about the hard drive? The machine is only 5 years old. – ModalBro Mar 12 '21 at 20:54
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    Unfortunately if you're getting Hard Drive errors and write problems, the drive is already on its deathbed. Replace the drive. SSD is preferred nowadays, unless you've got some weird setup like a non standard drive type like a SAS backbone on the system – Thomas Ward Mar 12 '21 at 20:55
  • I'm upvoting for the help but not the content of the answer :-). Oh well, I guess this was bound to happen sometime... – ModalBro Mar 12 '21 at 20:58

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SOLVED::::: I also had the same problem and managed to fix it. It has nothing to do with electricity in your computer. Just make sure the boot options match with the ones on your computers boot options.

On my case i had booted ubuntu in GPT with UEFI without CSM but on the computer my boot options were set to UEFI with CSM. The solution was for me to change my settings to UEFI without CSM in my computer

To do: power off your computer then power it on then press (f10) to go to bios settings and go to bios options and scroll down untill you find the legacy,UEFI WITHOUT CSM AND UEFI WITH CSM..switch to UEFI without CSM and restart your computer and it will be okay.

&)

blankC
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RE: USB boot, HPs are very finnicky with getting booted. Your disk needs to be in the right format and you have to get a boot menu to select the drive proper to boot too. I had this problem trying to boot Ubuntu on a stick, and ended up going old school with a DVD drive.

RE: The Hard Drive

If you're getting read/write problems, unfortunately you are hosed. The drive is already dying.

The best bet is to try to access the drive from a live env and try and recover what you can, then replace the hard drive in the system. Hard drives die for all sorts of reasons, and there's no way to really diagnose it or repair a dying drive.

Thomas Ward
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Same problem here. Installed 18.4.4 at an old HP prebook, via USB, to a brand new SSD and replaced the original Windows HDD. HP won't boot from the SSD. Had to change boot option from "UEFI with CSM" to UEFI without CSM". Moreover, while booting the laptop keep flashing black screen, had to press "ESC" key until it shows a menu that can select "F9 Boot Device Option", in there there is a "ubuntu" option, then everything works boot from there. Unfortunately every time reboot had to press esc go into boot device option to select. But it kind of works.

All other advices from YT/Google about bad cable, bad SSD, boot order change, Legacy support, etc. are not matter.

Pretty sure it's HP's BIOS issue, but anyhow it's a workaround.

Weber
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I had the same problem as listed above.

Indeed, changing the BIOS boot settings to the "UEFI without CSM" mode helps. Had to reinstall Ubuntu Server I believe.

The reason I'm posting is to complete Weber's answer. I do have the same problem where the screen flickers and the system is stuck in a Boot loop... Found a solution to choose the EFI booting file. You can actually set it up as a custom boot options that gets selected automatically every time you boot.

See this post: https://askubuntu.com/a/554721

Select Custom Boot Image, add this: \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi

Hope this helps!

sylv
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