Support Notes

2024/09/27

David Robinson

2024-09-27 HP Laptop PC 15s-fq2000 / 15s-fq2071tu won’t boot after windows update

An interesting one, Windows refused to boot and refused to allow any troubleshooting or roll back. Error DRIVER_PNP_WATCHDOG. Upon booting from USB Windows 11 flash drive, the SSD can’t be found. Yet its in the BIOS without issue. Tried booting from the HP Cloud recovery tool and this also didn’t boot.

After much googling, found that this can be related to intel Optane Storage Driver. Something Intel is playing with and it seems Windows 11 may not be happy with. Found the option in the BIOS, set Preserve storage to True and Disable Optane.

After about 5 minutes the Bios came back alive and the PC booted Windows 11 without any problems. Made sure customer windows updates were all there and gave her back a working laptop without needing to reinstall windows or anything drastic.