Forum Discussion
Constant "Boot device not found" and "ran into a problem and needs to restart"
Given the recurring nature of the problem, back up your important files immediately: Use an external drive or cloud storage. You can also create a full disk image if you’re comfortable with tools like Macrium Reflect or similar, just in case.
Thanks, Wylders — absolutely agree on the backup recommendation. Given the combination of symptoms (cold‑boot failures, normal restart, and now a blue screen during regular use), backing up the drive is the safest first step.
Once that’s done, we can narrow down the root cause. On these HP Spectre models, this behaviour usually comes from either:
- the SSD taking too long to initialize when cold, or
- a firmware timing issue that HP has corrected in some BIOS updates.
If you can share the “Device Configurations” BIOS page, I can check whether your model exposes any storage‑related options. Otherwise, checking for a BIOS update and planning for an SSD replacement are the two most reliable next steps.
Thankfully I have a Carbonite backup constantly running, and I also did a full backup on an external drive last week.
I had a more tech-savvy friend visiting the other day and got him to take a look, and he agrees that the hard drive might need to be replaced. He thinks there could be a disconnect somewhere between the hard drive and the motherboard, but we haven't pinned down exactly where.
We tried running some diagnostics, a SMART check and a UEFI, but for some reason the SMART wouldn't do a full scan (the partial scan didn't show any problems) and then we couldn't get the computer to boot from a USB to do the UEFI. (Yes we changed the boot order in the BIOS; we had no idea what else to do when that didn't work.) We also did a memory test and a hard drive test in the BIOS and didn't get any unusual results.
I also got a picture of the error code on the "Boot device not found" screen: 3F0. It's the same code every time. (I haven't seen the blue screen in a few days so I still haven't gotten that one.)
If I don't have a breakthrough, my next step will be taking it to a specialty store for service. I suspect I'll need to do that no matter what the exact problem is.
