Solved "Attempting to boot form hard drive" - weeks of frustration

adamcodes716 · Aug 22, 2025

I have now spent weeks on this problem, with no end in sight.

Background

I have a few HP workstations - one z200 and several z620s. I like to buy similar machines so that I can swap parts out when I have difficulties like this. Admittedly, these workstations were not eligible for windows 11 upgrade, so I had to create a boot device to fool the eligibility requirements. I have been running windows 11 on all of these machines since for a couple of years now. I don't use this pc a lot, but the other ones get used daily and have not had an issue. There were no changes to the pc before I started experiencing this issue.

Last month, I booted up my z200 only to be met with the "Attempting to boot from hard drive" error. To be clear, the OS drive has always been seen in the BIOS, and it is always the first in the boot sequence (I disabled other drives while I tried to get the OS drive working).

Attempt 1: Replace the disk

I had been meaning to buy a new SSD as a backup, so I thought I would try this. I copied the original drive, and had the same issue (which should not be surprising)

Attempt 2: Fix with EasyBCD

I booted the pc into Hiren's BootCD and used EasyBCD to fix the MBR (the z200 is NOT UEFI). This worked! That is, it worked for a few days, and then I was back to the issue.

Attempt 3: Clean Install

I wiped the disk and created a single partition. I installed Win10, and then Win11 from that. This worked! .... for a few days, again.

Attempts 3 - 867: Banging Head on Table

I tried numerous things - other programs on the BootCD, various OS commands, etc. I had copilot walk me through numerous scenarios. I fed it screen captures of my settings, it told me what to do. The instructions were all of the same things you would find in guides - fixmbr, etc. I tried it with the boot files in the recovery partition and that partition as active, and I tried the same thing with the boot in the OS partition and the recovery partition removed. Nothing I did seemed to matter. Before every try, I had it set up exactly as I was told.

What Now?

Are windows updates potentially the culprit here? ANY help would be GREATLY appreciated. I really don't know what to try next.

OAT · Aug 22, 2025

adamcodes716 said:
Are windows updates potentially the culprit here?

Impossible to tell since you do not mention any build/version of the OS.
And Sorry about your troubles.
I also think that this might require @zbook 's expertise.

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mngerhold · Aug 23, 2025

I would suspect a failing drive.

JLArranz · Aug 23, 2025

Although you may know it, when installing Windows 10 the best is having the target drive totally unformatted, without partitions, and no other drives connected except the installing media (specially ones that have or have had OSs). You can get this with the diskpart command "clean" (careful to apply it to the correct drive). If you use "clean all" instead it will wipe the drive (overwrite every sector with zeroes), what can take some hours (but you might have malware and it would be worth).

This sounds me to hw problem w/o discarding malware. If the 2nd drive was new I'd suspect about RAM or motherboard, but I'd also expect software malfunctions due to the data deterioration before it affects the (small in size) info required to boot (I must admit some lack of experience and maybe knowledge here, possibly the booting info is more exposed because it changes every hour or anything, I've seen many cases described but I have only experienced some few random and transient problems in my own disks and 0 disk deaths in like 35 years, what you have is whatever except "random" or "transient", with a clean install and the other repairs failing in days I'd expect a "well-established" problem). In possible malware situations I trust more a DVD (it should be a dual layer one) than an USB stick, as the former requires recording software to be altered.

Researching the specs of a model requires a lot of time and may turn out impossible. I've seen a Z200 i3 540 4GB RAM for 60€, that would/could correspond to a no UEFI computer (in this kind of computer 16 GB RAM might be possible but "forced" or in the limit), and a Z240 with an i7 7700 that nearly supports Win11 officially and I don't consider possible it hasn't UEFI and 16 GB is standard for it (sounds there's also a Z200 with a 7th Gen i3 or similar). All this doubts go away with the actual current specs :) .

An old and very tightened PSU is an instability factor and not bad suspect (PSU failures/weaknesses tend to produce other kinds of instability and even booting failures, like no POST or hangs during bootup, but if it affects the data integrity it can produce this).

adamcodes716 · Aug 23, 2025

mngerhold said:
I would suspect a failing drive.

Thanks for the response! In attempt #1, I said that I had replaced the drive

adamcodes716 · Aug 23, 2025

JLArranz said:
Although you may know it, when installing Windows 10 the best is having the target drive totally unformatted, without partitions, and no other drives connected except the installing media (specially ones that have or have had OSs). You can get this with the diskpart command "clean" (careful to apply it to the correct drive). If you use "clean all" instead it will wipe the drive (overwrite every sector with zeroes), what can take some hours (but you might have malware and it would be worth).

This sounds me to hw problem w/o discarding malware. If the 2nd drive was new I'd suspect about RAM or motherboard, but I'd also expect software malfunctions due to the data deterioration before it affects the (small in size) info required to boot (I must admit some lack of experience and maybe knowledge here, possibly the booting info is more exposed because it changes every hour or anything, I've seen many cases described but I have only experienced some few random and transient problems in my own disks and 0 disk deaths in like 35 years, what you have is whatever except "random" or "transient", with a clean install and the other repairs failing in days I'd expect a "well-established" problem). In possible malware situations I trust more a DVD (it should be a dual layer one) than an USB stick, as the former requires recording software to be altered.

Researching the specs of a model requires a lot of time and may turn out impossible. I've seen a Z200 i3 540 4GB RAM for 60€, that would/could correspond to a no UEFI computer (in this kind of computer 16 GB RAM might be possible but "forced" or in the limit), and a Z240 with an i7 7700 that nearly supports Win11 officially and I don't consider possible it hasn't UEFI and 16 GB is standard for it (sounds there's also a Z200 with a 7th Gen i3 or similar). All this doubts go away with the actual current specs :) .

An old and very tightened PSU is an instability factor and not bad suspect (PSU failures/weaknesses tend to produce other kinds of instability and even booting failures, like no POST or hangs during bootup, but if it affects the data integrity it can produce this).

Thank you so much! I really appreciate you taking the time to type out all of that. I might try to install Windows 10 just to see if it is something with windows 11 that might be causing the issue. When I was able to get a successful Win11 install, it seemed to survive a few days worth of boots and then it would fail. In several of the attempts that I tried, I did at different times delete the partition and let the installer do the work.

mngerhold · Aug 23, 2025

adamcodes716 said:
Thanks for the response! In attempt #1, I said that I had replaced the drive

and were all the subsequent tests on the new drive? If so, then sorry, I didn't read carefully enough.

But if you copied a failing drive to a new one, perhaos that copied some unwanted 'bits', like a damaged MBR - I would start with a blank drive and work from that. Or get the duff drive working (albeit temporarily) as before, then clone it pronto.

TairikuOkami · Aug 23, 2025

adamcodes716 said:
I wiped the disk and created a single partition. I installed Win10, and then Win11 from that. This worked! .... for a few days, again.

I would have restored a system image to see, if the problem persist or if it was caused by a system change, like windows updates.

You have not mentioned, do you use secure boot, GPT and most importantly, what partitions you have, like:

noroseskip · Sep 10, 2025

I too have a Z200 Workstation set up the same way with the exact same issues.
Looking for answers.

adamcodes716 · Sep 11, 2025

noroseskip said:
I too have a Z200 Workstation set up the same way with the exact same issues.
Looking for answers.

Did this also happen to you out of the blue? I wiped everything clean and reinstalled again, and I haven't rebooted since - so far, so good. I believe that I haven't gotten the windows updates since the install either. I don't use the PC much so I have been putting it to sleep when not in use.

noroseskip · Sep 11, 2025

adamcodes716 said:
Did this also happen to you out of the blue? I wiped everything clean and reinstalled again, and I haven't rebooted since - so far, so good. I believe that I haven't gotten the windows updates since the install either. I don't use the PC much so I have been putting it to sleep when not in use.

Yes, I had retired it for a newer mini computer but still had files I wanted to start migrating, and when I started it up one day, all I saw was the cursor blinking in the corner, with no message, no logo, nothing.
I have since gotten it to boot long enough to get into the BIOS.
I'm checking my boot drive for files I need to save, and I may wipe it and reload
I may switch to an SSD strictly for booting my system, like they do on servers.

adamcodes716 · Sep 11, 2025

noroseskip said:
Yes, I had retired it for a newer mini computer but still had files I wanted to start migrating, and when I started it up one day, all I saw was the cursor blinking in the corner, with no message, no logo, nothing.
I have since gotten it to boot long enough to get into the BIOS.
I'm checking my boot drive for files I need to save, and I may wipe it and reload
I may switch to an SSD strictly for booting my system, like they do on servers.

That sounds like a completely different issue, probably hardware-related. I had no problem getting into the bios or accessing anything else on startup. I didn't hit an issue until it tried to find windows. Putting your OS on an SSD is always a good idea.

adamcodes716 · Sep 15, 2025

So I skated on the latest installation of Windows 11 for several weeks until the pc rebooted on me. I am now strangely getting a "disk read error" when it tries to boot up - that is a different error than I have seen since I started this. In the bios I can still see all of the storage devices.

adamcodes716 · Sep 16, 2025

noroseskip said:
Yes, I had retired it for a newer mini computer but still had files I wanted to start migrating, and when I started it up one day, all I saw was the cursor blinking in the corner, with no message, no logo, nothing.
I have since gotten it to boot long enough to get into the BIOS.
I'm checking my boot drive for files I need to save, and I may wipe it and reload
I may switch to an SSD strictly for booting my system, like they do on servers.

I FOUND THE PROBLEM! For some reason, the pc started to care about which SATA slots the drives were in even though the boot order was clearly set. As soon as I put the OS drive in slot 0, it fired right up. I can confirm that this was also the problem with the original drive - I popped it in and - after a boot into safe mode - it came back to life on the next boot.

noroseskip · Sep 27, 2025

I found my problem, too. See picture.
For MANY years, my drives were set as RAID+AHCI.
I changed the setting to IDE and VOLIA!
It's booting up with all the updates.

Scannerman · Sep 27, 2025

adamcodes716 said:
I FOUND THE PROBLEM! For some reason, the pc started to care about which SATA slots the drives were in even though the boot order was clearly set. As soon as I put the OS drive in slot 0, it fired right up. I can confirm that this was also the problem with the original drive - I popped it in and - after a boot into safe mode - it came back to life on the next boot.

Glad to learn you discovered the problem. I just found this thread but if you are still using Easy BCD they also have some software tools that can help with solving booting issues, especially on older systems. Myself, especially when using MBR, I don't like sharing a boot strap with other operating systems because if one OS goes down the rest go down with it.

noroseskip said:
I found my problem, too. See picture.
For MANY years, my drives were set as RAID+AHCI.
I changed the setting to IDE and VOLIA!
It's booting up with all the updates.
View attachment 146830

WOW. IDE saves the day! Who woulda thought? Definitely not me. That old girl must be pushing 16 years or so for IDE to still be an option. Reminds me of an old DELL Inspiron that refused to die on me so I gave it to some kids a few years back. This option wouldn't work for me as I'm a fan of RAID. Still good to know though. Thanks for sharing.

Milio_ranger · Dec 25, 2025

adamcodes716 said:
I FOUND THE PROBLEM! For some reason, the pc started to care about which SATA slots the drives were in even though the boot order was clearly set. As soon as I put the OS drive in slot 0, it fired right up. I can confirm that this was also the problem with the original drive - I popped it in and - after a boot into safe mode - it came back to life on the next boot.

Milio_ranger · Dec 25, 2025

With mine HP Z200 the exact same problem uccurred after running one of the latest security updates of 25H2. Now I posponed the updates but this can only be done for 6 weeks. If the problem happens again I hope to solve it with the mentioned solutions. So choose IDE instead of RAID+ACHI OR switch the sata port to port 0. It would be great to keep using the Z200 as I just changed the CPU with a i5-760 and GTX-1050 which makes it fast enough for most applications and lots of games. Thank you for posting the problem.

Solved "Attempting to boot form hard drive" - weeks of frustration

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