Hello,
I recently received a laptop from a relative who complained that the laptop would not stay on unless plugged in and that it would randomly blue screen very often. The laptop was quite old (produced 2019) so I ordered a battery replacement. I also ran SMART tests on the SSD which reported it to be in very poor condition, likely the cause of the blue screens, so I cloned the drive for backup.
I installed both the battery and a known working SSD into the laptop which I copied the backup to, however, the laptop didn't recognize any bootable device and doesn't seem to be able to see the SSD. I also tried plugging in a USB with a Windows installer. The installer booted, however couldn't find any storage devices to install to, and, using certain installer versions, reported that there is no driver present for the storage media. I also tried a Linux Mint installer, which did not find any storage devices either. The installed SSD was not reported as a block device or PCI device (of which it should be both).
I additionally tried the old failing SSD, thinking the new one may have support or driver issues, however the system also did not recognize the SSD. This lead me to believe the next logical step would be a BIOS update, and I went to search for a BIOS to flash onto the laptop. The only available version of this was a Windows program which would format and place EFI files onto a USB, which I had to run virtualized with a USB host passthrough. I was able to browse the EFI files the tool put on the USB, on the laptop, but none would boot or make any recognizable change. I also 0'd out the first 20GB of the drive to ensure any remnant of the linux installer was gone, and re-run the HP program, after which the laptop no longer found any file system on the drive.
Throughout the entire process of trial and error with the USB, the laptop was extremely inconsistent at recognizing the USB file system. Occasionally, it would not even read the USB at all (it has a disk status light which flashes whenever disk IO is occurring) and report no boot device found. The BIOS also does not appear to recognize either SSD as the builtin storage diagnostic tool reports that no hard drive is installed.
For reference, I sourced the BIOS update program from here:
https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/hp-envy-15-ds0000-x360-convertible-pc/26122268
The full laptop model number is l15m-ds0011dx
Both disks tried:
HFM256GDJTNG-8310A (Failing)
THNSN5512GPU7 (Works in other devices)
I am not sure where to go from here, I would appreciate any help to get the laptop running again!