HP Envy 15 corrupted bios bootloop

Hi HP owners. My wifes laptop, Envy 15-ae090, recently went into a bootloop. The bios is corrupted and keeps trying to restore itself, fails, reboots...

By pressing esc, F5, etc. (seemingly random buttons actually) upon powering on, occassionally it lets you access the boot menu, at which point you can access the 'bios settings' (non-UEFI), HP Diagnostics (which is usless), or boot Windows 10... No problem booting Windows if you can get access to the boot menu!

I've tried every possible method of reflashing the bios, it simply fails every time, instantly, it doesn't even start to flash. It's very frustrating, because this feels like a manufactured problem, especially as it started randomly, at no point did we attempt to update the bios...

I'd this this a common issue with HP? A Google search has found other Hp owners that have had this or similar problem. Just wondering if it's widespread? It's also annoying because it conveniently started just after the warranty expired.

 

This might be a broken bios chip. Contact HP as quickly as possible, maybe they will still repair it on warranty.

 

Warranty recently finished, thats why spent hours trying to fix it myself

I'm guessing the only way of fixing this is by replacing the mainboard.

I have no envy for this laptop...

 

So the support confirmed to you that they will not fix it?
I assume you tried this?
https://support.hp.com/ca-en/document/c02693833

 

Tried this and every other possible way of flashing the bios. The result is the same, gives an instant error message without even attempting to flash. I will contact support, I doubt they would repair it for free outside of warranty though.

What really bugs me, is the way they hide the boot menu. In the one out of ten boots where I can access the boot menu, when I choose Continue Startup it load Windows without any issues. In the pre-UEFI days you could just hit F2 within a few seconds of power up to access the boot menu.

It seems stupid to me, if the bios really is corrupted, as is indicated by the bootloop, then it should not be able to load Windows. If anything, it should be a black screen upon power up, nothing more. Thats why it seems like an engineered error, or at the very least, a design flaw of the boot process. But if it's not a widespread issue, then I guess it really is a fried bios chip

Edit: Just found the proof of purchase and it still has 6 weeks left on the 2 year warranty! Lucky...

 

Great! It could also be a harddrive problem. If it doesn't correctly initialize on power on, this can cause a lot of weird issues and behaviour.

 

I thought the same. Except Windows boots fine from the boot menu (i.e. bypassing the automated bios recovery), and all the partitions are fine (including hidden partitions), and in the tests of HP Diagnostics everything is a pass, even the mainboard.

So I believe the embedded UEFI chip is defective.