I'm really stuck. I just received a refurbished all-in-one 23-b320 with Windows 8 pre loaded. All worked great for the first 4 hours. I applied all the MS patches and then began the update to Windows 8.1. At 23% complete, the process hung. After 16 hours of no further progress, I powered off the desktop. Going into the recovery mode via the Bios, I expected to be able to recover. The recovery process failed.
My next attempt was to take the recovery disks I created from a new 23-b320 that also was preloaded with Windows 8 but I had successfully updated to Windows 8.1. The recovery disks are the Windows 8 from its recovery partition. I used the Recovery Manager to create the disks and Windows reported they were created successfully and verified. Yes, I have 2 identical models of the all-in-one -- 2 parents and it is easier when they both have the same pc. I figured I could use one to fix the other.
The problem is that the recovery disks throw an error part way through the recovery -- 0xe0ef001e.
After looking through the forums, I booted with a Windows 8.1 install disk, went into "Repair the Computer" mode, troubleshooting, command line and used diskpart clean and convert gpt. I then went back to the recovery disks and got the same error.
Then I thought perhaps I could install Windows 8.1 fresh against that disk since I just wiped out all the partitions with the clean command and had set up a new set of partitions. Once installed, perhaps then the recovery disks would work. Well, I can get the Windows 8.1 install to work either. When I select the partition to install on, it reports "Partions on the disk selected for installation are not in the recommended order". I proceed and receive the error -- 0x80070057.
I have wiped out the partitions with diskpart clean and then attempted to allow the installation to set them. Same result. When the windows installer creates the partitions, it throws the same error about the partition order and the same error when I say "proceed anyway".
I've seen mention of other partitioning tools but have not been able to use any (such as Kill Disk) because they seem to boot to DOS and for some reason I can't get the All-in-one to boot to soming as simple as DOS. The only things I've been able to get it to boot to (with Secure Boot off) are:
1) The recovery disks
2) Windows 8.1 Install disk
3) Ubuntu 14.04
These all are gpt bootable images. The BIOS doesn't find anything that is not gpt so anything with the old MBR doesn't show up in the list of bootable devices. I've tried many different disks from older systems and none are recognized.
Note: I did discover that I had not activated the legacy boot support in the bios so have activated it an am now able to boot into DOS. I'm trying some of the other tools suggested like Kill Disk.
I have run through all the diagnostics from the BIOS and no errors found in any of the tests.
Any suggestions or is this now time to ship it into HP for repair/replace?