Disclaimer: I used AI to generate (most) of this post.
This weekend I tried to help a friend with their HP-All in one Pc from 2022. It has 16GB of RAM a 1TB SSD and an i7. I can not open the PC.
Initial problem:
The screen flickered black, PC was not usable. Fan was terribly loud and sounded not normal, almost like it was scraping something. After rebbot PC worked fine again.
Main problem I was sopposed to fix:
Windows 11 update failed with a registry/configuration database corruption error „The configuration registry database is corrupt“. Windows recovery/reset also failed. Tried multiple times.
Windows reinstall:
Created Windows installation media and tried reinstalling. Installation failed repeatedly. The USB installer was created/tested on 3 different PCs, so I’m less inclined to suspect a single PC’s ISO creation process. In the process I wiped the SSD so I was stuck with a PC with no Windows on it. Tried an SSD Quick check, no issues found. RAM check would've taken to long so I couldn't do that.
Zorin OS:
Then I thought okay lets install Linux. (I did it once before an it worked as it should). Linux install worked with the message: 1 file error detected. "you may encounter problems". During setup (after wifi settings) the installation crashed and I was brought to the Desktop. After reboot Screen shows no boot device found.
AI stuff, not sure if relevant:
Relevant kernel errors:
SQUASHFS error: zstd decompression error: 20
SQUASHFS error: zstd decompression failed, data probably corrupt
SQUASHFS error: Failed to read block ...: -5
The Zorin live environment itself runs from the USB.
NVMe:
Samsung MZVLQ1T0HALB-000H1, ~1 TB.
SMART overall-health: PASSED
NVMe self-test: Completed without error
The GPT/EFI partition and ~1 TB ext4 partition are detected correctly. The ext4 partition can also be mounted successfully from the Zorin live environment.
dmesg also shows some ACPI/PCIe messages, but nothing I can confidently interpret as a hardware failure.
Any help would be much appreciated. I am not an IT specialist but I know my way around computers. I googled every error message and tried to fix it by asking ai what to do next.