Win 10 Refuses to Install in Any Way, Shape, or Form to an HP Laptop

Geekomatic on 26/11/2021 - 00:21

About to pull my hair out. The laptop is an HP 17-ak001ax . Gentleman asked my help as it refused to update and kept "undoing changes". I've tried booting three known-good USB drives and one known-good DVD (W10-2004) disc and I just cannot get it to install. When I say known-good, I mean I just started them all on my own machines and they make it to the installer fine.

At first I thought maybe some errant file or such was corrupt so used Linux to format the drive to NTFS so everything was new.

The DVD gets to a Win flag onscreen and hangs (or restarts the whole install), the USB's do a variety of things including a flash of blue at top of screen before a flash of the Win flag center of screen before looping back to the same thing, over and over. Or nothing happens and just loops back to the start….It doesn't matter whether legacy is enabled or UEFI (secure boot disabled)—- same thing!

I even opened a brand new USB and let the MS creator agonizingly make the USB (21H2) & I get the same, f*cking thing!!! WTaF is going on? I ran the HP diags on HDD/RAM and all passed….I've tried both legacy & UEFI— same thing. I do this a lot for people so I do know my way around computers, but this is the first time I simply cannot get it installed to a blank drive. I'm stumped.

Any gurus around who might have had this happen to them?

Computing

Comments

  • Hybroid on 26/11/2021 - 00:26

    Are you updating existing OS to Win 10? If so, try a fresh install from scratch.
    or
    Are you trying a fresh install from scratch? Try an OS upgrade first then fresh install.

  • toomuchdogfur on 26/11/2021 - 00:46
    +2

    Ah it's the good ol "shit just dun wurk" disease. Happens to every family member or relative of a techie.

    Given your USB drives are known good ones, I can only guess that the data is getting mangled on the laptop somehow… I'd be suspecting that HDD first, regardless of whether it's passing HP diagnostis or not and especially since the laptop was having trouble updating previously (i.e. it could be attempting to write updates to disk, but finding it could not read said updates correctly afterwards).

    IMO try and swap out the two parts in that laptop that you can and try again. Hopefully you're the type that has spare parts just laying around:

    • Swap the HDD out for a SSD
    • Reseat or swap the RAM out

    If still buggered… Try installing Windows 10 on an SSD using another computer, then swap that SSD in and see if it boots - modern Windows is surprisingly tolerant of huge hardware changes (though I definitely wouldn't run an install like this other than for testing). If that actually works, or at least works somewhat, then something is truly bung with that laptop.

    • Geekomatic on 26/11/2021 - 01:21

      Trying to avoid disassembly. It's odd it can boot Linux fine, but not the OS it was designed for. And as far as HDD, the installer booting does so to RAM, not disk, so now I'm truly confused.

      I've never seen this in twenty years of IT work & I cannot find anything online like it.

      I never get past the flag, ie, not even to the 1st screen to choose language/KB.

  • Almost Banned on 26/11/2021 - 01:29
    +3

    I had to read the title five times before I worked out it wasn't some type of competition…

    • Geekomatic on 26/11/2021 - 15:23

      "Win 10 Refuses to Install in Any Way, Shape, or Form to an HP Laptop"

      Not sure how you'd surmise "a competition" out of that sentence, but whatever…

      • Almost Banned on 26/11/2021 - 15:33
        +1

        Its not that hard to work out and at least 2 people agree with me.
        Look at the competition category and tell me, what word does EVERY entry there start with?
        I kept thinking 'what is a refuse, why would I want 10 of them, what do they do on an HP Laptop, and do I care enough to enter the competition'

  • trustnoone on 26/11/2021 - 02:04
    +1

    Is bios updated? What was the Windows version initially on the devices? Have you tried a slower burnt DVD disk (or different branded one? I've actually had this be an issue before, though of course it doesn't explain the win 10 issue). Have you tried 7 and do you get further in the install?

    • Geekomatic on 26/11/2021 - 15:18

      Was 10 1909 and owner couldn't get it to update, kept failing. Have tried a known-good DVD, same fail. See latest post as to what worked (sort of).

  • Montyjpm on 26/11/2021 - 06:15

    "used Linux to format the drive to NTFS" you formatted the HP HDD or the USB? You happen to know if the HDD has bitlocker encrypted before? Can you test to see if you can put Ubuntu onto it first? If the laptop has TPM 2.0 then try and install Win11 and let us know the result. But yeah, reseat RAM and HDD if still no good.

    • Geekomatic on 26/11/2021 - 15:20

      Used GParted to format the drive to NTFS, thinking maybe the leftover partitions were causing the grief. Later, managed to get into one of the M$ installers and run Diskpart to clean/format again.

  • weezlebub on 26/11/2021 - 08:56

    HP's kind of suck for this, see if you can get a HP specific windows …

    i had a client who had a laptop that came with windows 8 and he wanted 10, wouldn't install, their support said it wasn't supported and couldn't happen, he gave me the laptop … i put in a hard drive that i'd fully installed windows onto (on another PC) and it worked find (still working fine now, just thinking of dumping an SSD into it for a little more speed)

    • Geekomatic on 26/11/2021 - 15:17

      This is the 1st ANY laptop I've seen which refuses to boot up known-working USB's/DVD. Although I'll agree that HP laptops are @ss.

  • wazzac on 26/11/2021 - 09:17

    Can you do a RAM test or swap it out? In my experience faulty memory can cause all sorts of weird and seeminly inconsistent behaviour

    • Geekomatic on 26/11/2021 - 15:16

      HDD & RAM tested and both 100% okay.

  • [Deactivated] on 26/11/2021 - 13:09

    Reset BIOS.
    Update BIOS if there is an update available. Reset again.
    Try again.

  • Geekomatic on 26/11/2021 - 15:12

    Hi all, well the saga continues….

    Last night, I found an old Win 1709 usb and lo & behold— it installed w/o a hitch! I then went to the Microshaft website and found they support direct upgrade to 21H2 with their "assistant" (from-hell). Let the thing download and it began installing, but had to get to bed.

    Got up this morning and surprise (not) there's Win 1709 to greet me. Not even any sort of evidence of a failed upgrade to be found anywhere, no logs, no nothing, as if it never happened. I swear this is the weirdest BS I've ever seen, and I've dealt with a LOT of it from M$.

    RE: BIOS flash. I can check the version, but the way this thing is going, I'm actually fearful of bricking the thing, even if I, do everything correctly!

  • Geekomatic on 26/11/2021 - 18:02

    Omg. It completes, restarts, back to 1709!!! FFS. How is this happening and leaving NO logfiles??

  • Geekomatic on 29/11/2021 - 16:51

    It's installed. Unbelievable! For reference, (starting @1709, the only OS that would even boot): before proceeding (for the third time- each time took overnight), I made sure to check WU and it showed nothing needed updates. Still, I went ahead and used device manager to update network and display (as I usually do). There were frigging updates available! WTaF??? So much for checking WU. Because of that, I ran WUOffline Installer. That took a good hour or so. Then, when I ran the assistant, everything went as before and I sort of thought it would fail (as it previously would get to 88% and from there take over an hour, finish successfully, restart, and back to 1709). But no! It's now sitting on the latest. Hope this helps the other folks with this issue on the A9 AMD CPU (lots of them online). PS: when it failed previously, there were NO log files created.

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