Defiance 15 stuck on PXE Boot

C

Clear Angle

Member
Hi all, I am having an issue with a new Defiance 15 laptop. I turned it on, configured it and handed it over to a user. They complained they could not use an external drive with it and I confirmed this to be the case. A USB stick did work though. I turned it off and moved it to my desk but it now won't boot. It starts to boot, I get the logo and then an EFI PXE boot failed message. I have no idea how to get into the Bios as Del, F10 and the usuals don't work.

Any ideas anyone on how to get it out of this PXE boot loop?

Thanks in advance!
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
Clear Angle said:
Hi all, I am having an issue with a new Defiance 15 laptop. I turned it on, configured it and handed it over to a user. They complained they could not use an external drive with it and I confirmed this to be the case. A USB stick did work though. I turned it off and moved it to my desk but it now won't boot. It starts to boot, I get the logo and then an EFI PXE boot failed message. I have no idea how to get into the Bios as Del, F10 and the usuals don't work.

Any ideas anyone on how to get it out of this PXE boot loop?

Thanks in advance!
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I would just open it up and unseat the OS drive and then reseat it, it's possible it's not fully seated. This won't affect your warranty, PCS have an open chassis policy.

I think the BIOS shortcut is F2 but if quick boot is enabled, it may take a few goes to get in.
 
C

Clear Angle

Member
Thanks for that. Strangely mashing Esc seemed to do the trick as well and Windows booted up normally. At first the keyboard wasn't working but a reboot and mashing Esc has got me to fully functioning Windows. So I am now sitting in Win 10 with the external disk issue still here. I can pick up the disk fine on my other machine, I tried formatting it from exfat to NTFS but no joy. A 16GB USB stick comes up fine though.
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
Clear Angle said:
Thanks for that. Strangely mashing Esc seemed to do the trick as well and Windows booted up normally. At first the keyboard wasn't working but a reboot and mashing Esc has got me to fully functioning Windows. So I am now sitting in Win 10 with the external disk issue still here. I can pick up the disk fine on my other machine, I tried formatting it from exfat to NTFS but no joy. A 16GB USB stick comes up fine though.
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I take it you mean an external USB dvd drive?
 
C

Clear Angle

Member
Ah, no. An external disk drive. Basically we use 1Tb SSD drives in a Startech secure case with a USB 3.1 cable to connect to machines to transfer data on and off. So a new laptop that cannot detect drives is pretty useless to me!

Also thanks for the tip RE F2, I have disabled PXE boot at the bios!
 
C

Clear Angle

Member
I do indeed. To sanity check I got a 4TB mechanical external drive and plugged it in. It came up, no problem.

I went and fetched a second secure case SSD and plugged it in. Nothing. Plug it into another machine, works. I bought 4 new lappies from PCS and this one just for some reason seems to have the lion's share of issues.
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
Clear Angle said:
I do indeed. To sanity check I got a 4TB mechanical external drive and plugged it in. It came up, no problem.

I went and fetched a second secure case SSD and plugged it in. Nothing. Plug it into another machine, works. I bought 4 new lappies from PCS and this one just for some reason seems to have the lion's share of issues.
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That’s really odd. And all devices are accounted for in device manager?
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
If I'm reading this right there are TWO issues here....

1. You got the EFI PXE boot failed measage on boot?

2. It won't detect a Startech secure case external drive but does detect other external drives?

Issue 1 is caused because the BIOS couldn't find a bootable drive in the laptop. If you look at the boot order you'll see that a network boot is typically the last option. Disabling that won't help, if the boot drive isn't found again the laptop still won't boot. @SpyderTracks rightly advised checking that the boot drive is securely plugged in because the problem is that the BIOS didn't detect that drive on boot. Sometimes this problem is caused by a flaky drive so I would advise keeping a close eye on that laptop at boot time and if this happens again call PCS and talk about swapping the boot drive.

Issue 2 doesn't seem to be related (though I'm wary of apparent coincidences). What format do these Startech secure case drives use (NFTS or exFAT)? How big is the external drive (in TB I mean)? These Startech enclosures can be encrypted I believe, are they encrypted in your case? Perhaps there's something about the encryption that the laptop doesn't like? Can you disable the encryption (temporarily) and see whether it's recognised then?
 
C

Clear Angle

Member
ubuysa said:
If I'm reading this right there are TWO issues here....

1. You got the EFI PXE boot failed measage on boot?

2. It won't detect a Startech secure case external drive but does detect other external drives?

Issue 1 is caused because the BIOS couldn't find a bootable drive in the laptop. If you look at the boot order you'll see that a network boot is typically the last option. Disabling that won't help, if the boot drive isn't found again the laptop still won't boot. @SpyderTracks rightly advised checking that the boot drive is securely plugged in because the problem is that the BIOS didn't detect that drive on boot. Sometimes this problem is caused by a flaky drive so I would advise keeping a close eye on that laptop at boot time and if this happens again call PCS and talk about swapping the boot drive.

Issue 2 doesn't seem to be related (though I'm wary of apparent coincidences). What format do these Startech secure case drives use (NFTS or exFAT)? How big is the external drive (in TB I mean)? These Startech enclosures can be encrypted I believe, are they encrypted in your case? Perhaps there's something about the encryption that the laptop doesn't like? Can you disable the encryption (temporarily) and see whether it's recognised then?
Click to expand...

Thanks for the responses guys. I am going to close this thread now as the issue is by and large resolved (after disabling network boot it boots fine every time) and the external drives issue is a separate issue. But before I close it I will answer briefly your first questions first:

I formatted the drives to both NTFS and exFAT but neither showed up. An NTFS 16Gb USB stick showed up fine and a slow mechanical 4 Tb External Drive formatted to exFAT showed up fine too. The Startech cases have 1 and 4 Tb SSD HDDs inside them, and yes while they are encrypted they are decrypted with an input on the keypad of the drives themselves.

Anyway, as I said the initial question is resolved so thanks all for your help!
 
C

Clear Angle

Member
Hi all, so I have a brand new Defiance 15 that I bought with 3 other machines for our VFX business.

I am having the strangest issue with it. We use Startech 2.5 inch encrypted secure cases for all our data transfer needs but for some reason this laptop is not recognising any of them. It doesn't matter if they are formatted NTFS or exFAT. With all the other machines in my office you plug the drive in, key in the password on the keypad and then it pops up in Windows. Not this one. Nothing happens whatsoever.

I plugged in unencrypted drives and they are perfectly usable. A 16GB USB drive popped up, a 4Tb mechanical drive popped up. I cannot figure out what's wrong!

Nothing in disk management. Nothing in diskpart. Nothing in event viewer. Nothing unusual in the bios. All drivers are present in Device Manager.

Does anyone have any idea what it might be? It's literally just this machine.
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I've merged the new thread you just started on your Startech issue because it's already under discussion in this thread. There's no point starting a new thread for the same problem.
 
C

Clear Angle

Member
ubuysa said:
I've merged the new thread you just started on your Startech issue because it's already under discussion in this thread. There's no point starting a new thread for the same problem.
Click to expand...
Thanks, I was looking to close the old one but couldn't see how!
 
C

Clear Angle

Member
A further development. After a metric ton of troubleshooting I came across an interesting discovery. If you plug in a USB hub and then plug the secure drive into THAT it works. So the support person at Startech had this to say:

"Good idea to try that! Actually, this is something that I've seen in the past (with other products, not this one). In those instances, it was directly related to some sort of interoperability between the controller on our device and the one withing the computer (would be chipset/USB controller in this case). Essentially, putting the hub (which has it's own, different controller) in between as a buffer allows the two offending ones to communicate.It's difficult to tell if the issue is related to hardware (power difference?) or drivers (bug or some sort of difference with the chipset?)."

The laptop in question is Clevo PC50DF1

I will see what I can do now to push further to answers and a resolution!
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Clear Angle said:
A further development. After a metric ton of troubleshooting I came across an interesting discovery. If you plug in a USB hub and then plug the secure drive into THAT it works. So the support person at Startech had this to say:

"Good idea to try that! Actually, this is something that I've seen in the past (with other products, not this one). In those instances, it was directly related to some sort of interoperability between the controller on our device and the one withing the computer (would be chipset/USB controller in this case). Essentially, putting the hub (which has it's own, different controller) in between as a buffer allows the two offending ones to communicate.It's difficult to tell if the issue is related to hardware (power difference?) or drivers (bug or some sort of difference with the chipset?)."

The laptop in question is Clevo PC50DF1

I will see what I can do now to push further to answers and a resolution!
Click to expand...
It seems to me that's their way of admitting that these enclosures are not universally interoperable but they don't know why. Since you've found a way to make it work with that laptop (and kudos for thinking of trying that!) I would stick with that workaround. :)
 
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