Help! I think I bricked my PC!

[cowmama7]

Last night when altering drive partitions I deleted a nearly empty partition (not an essential one) and was met with an error message prompting me to restart the Pc. However upon restarting all I have been able to access is the hp screen, prompting me to press escape for the startup menu. Upon pressing escape, nothing happens. I waited overnight to see if anything would change, but nothing did. The computer I’m running is a triple boot windows 7, Windows 10, and Linux Mint 20.1 system, with Linux mint as the primary operating system. The model of the computer is an HP elitebook 8640p with 16gb DDR3 and a Core i5 2520m. The keyboard doesn’t seem to be frozen as the caps lock light still functions, but the screen may be. Is there anything I can do?

[AndyMH]

For starters, boot your mint install stick and either post a screenshot running gparted or open a terminal and sudo parted --list and post the output, this will tell us what your drives and partitions are.

I'm guessing that with a second gen i5 you are probably booting legacy, but you may be booting UEFI and managed to delete your EFI partition. If the latter I'm not aware of an easy way to get it back.

[cowmama7]

Took my usb stick, it’s running Rufus to be bootable, stuck it in but still nothing because It won’t let me enter the bios to change the boot priority :/

[trytip]

Took my usb stick, it’s running Rufus to be bootable, stuck it in but still nothing because It won’t let me enter the bios to change the boot priority :/

i have older hdmi TV with max resolution of 1280x720 connected to my computer. when new video updates in windows or linux i get blank screen at boot with no option to enter bios.
UNplug any extra video hdmi and reboot. if still nothing it means things changed hard drive UUID when it formatted. this nearly empty partition may have been your bios settings
you need to first figure out your computer bios settings and be able to boot a live linux.

[AndyMH]

Virtually all PCs allow access to the 'one time' boot list via a function key. It is F12 on my thinkpads, F11 on my desktop. No idea what yours will be.

[cowmama7]

Thanks! No luck yet, however I found the computer begins beeping when I press f12, not sure what that means though, any ideas?

Edit: same thing happens with f11

[Flemur]

Thanks! No luck yet, however I found the computer begins beeping when I press f12, not sure what that means though, any ideas?

Edit: same thing happens with f11

You were so close!

For most HP laptops...

"To start Computer Setup, follow these steps:

Turn On or restart the computer, and then press esc while the Press the ESC key [sic] for Startup Menu message is displayed at the bottom of the screen.

Press f10 to enter Computer Setup."

[Rocky Bennett]

Remove the CMOS battery and let the PC sit for a couple of hours.

[trytip]

Remove the CMOS battery and let the PC sit for a couple of hours.

looks like an elitebook laptop
try F10 or F9 or both. usually there is a post message onscreen with information about setup or boot. do you see nothing after you turn power on?

[Termy]

That does sound pretty bad, not gonna lie. If this were back in ye olde days, I'd have said to unplug the IDE drive and check the BIOS again, in-case the drive was buggered and halting the BIOS somehow.

I don't see why a perfectly healthy drive would cause a BIOS/UEFI to not display, no matter what you do to its partition table or partitions therein. Maybe modern UEFIs are super-sensitive, I dunno.

[Keith2021]

cowmama7,
Did you ever get this figured out? I have about the same problem and wanted to know if you had to get a new computer since you couldn't get into the Bios.

[rene]

This is/was a known issue on some early UEFI systems, most specifically those with an early Phoenix "SecureCore Tiano 1.x" UEFI implementation and amounts/ed to installation of any OS in UEFI mode causing this issue due to a BUG in the machine's handling of some UEFI parameters. Entry to the BIOS could be restored at least by reflashing the BIOS (which would usually require a Windows install on to the system; note that you can legally download and install Windows 10 directly from Microsoft for testing purposes such as "does this Windows version allow to flash a BIOS?"). You need to make sure to use command-line switches or checkboxes on a graphical flash-tool to e.g. "clear UEFI variables" or some such.

I'd immediately set the system to legacy rather than UEFI as soon as the BIOS flash would allow entry into the BIOS again, and keep it on legacy for then installing Linux.

[GELvdH]

As AndyMH said most pc's are able to change the boot sequence, I have an HP a couple of years old and when I press the ESC key several times during boot it comes up to the selecting screen. You might try that to see if you can get a different boot sequence.