[SOLVED] HP COMPAQ CQ58. No bootable device, after cloning and ultimately fresh Windows 10 install. What gives?

Bill Nikolakakis

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May 12, 2014
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Hello everyone,

I have tinkered with a variety of systems in my time however, this gotta be one of the worst instances.

The problem:
A father of a close friend, calls over me to provide said tips about his train like sounding but snail like performing HP COMPAQ Pressario CQ58 (I know, a piece of work). We agreed I take the laptop home. Give it a the good ol' inside cleaning, repasting, cleaning the fan, Cloning the attrocious HDD to a new cheap SSD so we can squeeze 2? maybe 3 more years out of this devil. I got my self an ADATA SU650 240GB for the occasion which is will replace an HDD Hitachi Z5K320-320.
So I start over with my trusty off-brand electronics repair kit, work my way around the laptop, gather every screw. Of course you have to take the keyboard for the last screws to be removed so the laptop inner workings can be separated. I left some heavy sweat doing that, as it seems the constant heat of the old crusty and almost non existant CPU paste, may have affected the keyboards form. I take it out, open the laptop up, the works. Get to cleaning, used some isop. alcohol, qtips, an old toothbruh everything got mint. Worked my way throught the FAN everything here mint as well. I gave it the good old rice grain paste and slapped everything together again. Booted up, after what seemed an eternity I got into the HDD windows.

Cloning Arc:
Time for the cloning I thought. I connected my USB3.0 HDD/SSD hub onto my trusty computer (not the HP one). Opened up AOMEI Partition Wizard and went ahaid with the cloning. Because the HDD was around 320GB and the SSD was 240GB the P.W. automatically fixed the partition sizes. I knew from the get go, that through this method the drive letters would be of poop quality and probably the BCD would need some fixing so, I braced my self, let the P.W do its magic (pun intended) and after some time I had the cloned SSD in my hands. Slap this bad boy in the laptop. I thought hey, might be my lucky day, I boot it up of course the system would not recognize the drive. It gave a "Hard disk 1 (3F0)" error. I said fine, time to fix the BCD. Went through the process from this guide and of course it did not work because Microsoft. I thought hey, I am pretty tired and the laptop had no important stuff on it as well, just a bunch of .pdfs and a specialised program, I backed everything up by hooking up the disk and accessed it through a linux distro on my computer, grabbed everything. Let's not waste anymore time with HP doodoo, a clean Windows 10 install on the SSD is the way.

Clean Windows 10 Install Arc:
Go on to my computer, find my trusty Windows 10 2H22 64bit .iso, grab my known to work no-name USB3.0 Stick and slap the iso on the drive through RUFUS. Inserted the USB and then went through with the installation. Everything went fine. Time for the restart. The system restarted into the USB. I said no biggie. Let me remove it and restart. NOPE. Did not work got once more "Hard disk 1 (3F1)". I thought let me check the BIOS real quick. Legacy Support was Enabled, I disabled it for good measure, restarted and then I got the No Bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key. I tried re-installing now with Legacy Support set to disabled, no luck there as well. Tried re-installing in a different USB port, nope. In any case I tried many things but the gist is that even though the SSD passes the system checks from HP it is not recognized.

The dissapointment Arc:
I think I have tried almost everything in my knowledge so, I accepted defeat and tried to place back the old HDD. Tried to boot it and you guessed it. It did not work (3F1).
So lets resummarise of the things I have tried:
  1. Tried fixing the BCD both after cloning and after clean install (I tried through CMD and AOMEI PE enviroment)
  2. Loading Defaults on the BIOS
  3. Power cycling without battery or AC Adapter
  4. Removing the CMOS Battery
  5. Clean installed Win 10
  6. Tried installing both with Legacy Support Enabled or Disabled
  7. Checked the boot order
  8. Installed the old HDD
Everything above resulted in no booting.

I have made this imgur album that has important BIOS photos including specs and the general problem text. Album

Please help me for I am lost.
 
Solution
So after a ton of tinkering I found out Rufus can sometime be the culprit and as such, after creating the Installation USB through Media Creation Tool and a DISKPART> clean everything installed and booted fine. You never stop learning I guess...

Bill Nikolakakis

Distinguished
May 12, 2014
12
0
18,520
So after a ton of tinkering I found out Rufus can sometime be the culprit and as such, after creating the Installation USB through Media Creation Tool and a DISKPART> clean everything installed and booted fine. You never stop learning I guess...
 
Solution