Morning all - my BIL bought the HP Chromebook x360 about 4 months ago, told me it died last time he was using it and it won't boot now. I'm an IT Director but have limited experience with Chromebooks but I'm the de facto tech help in the fam so here we are. When I got it, it was bootlooping on the ChromeOS screen.

Started by getting into recover mode, checking diags and logs - no issues there to be seen. I've tried 3 different recovery methods - internet, internet (old) and via USB stick and I made the USB stick 2 different ways - once on my Win 11 machine and once on my Mac.

None of them work. Internet (old or new) errors out after a VERY long time. I can confirm via my WiFi controller it's connected and downloading but nothing happens. Recovery drive is recognized and starts but so far, hasn't finished. I've let it run for up to an hour at this point and I have USB recovery running now as well.

I did let it run overnight and finally got an error message this morning - can't post the image but here's what it said:

I'm guessing the HDD is borked somehow and from what I see the HDD might be eMMC and soldered in and not worth the trouble of replacing. I'm well versed in Windows recovery - normally I'd boot this with a bootable USB with Linux or Hiram's and start trying to fix things but that doesn't seem possible or logical on this - I am aware of dev mode to boot from USB, I tried that with the recovery drive and it didn't work.

Failed to initialize logical volume HDblablahblah/lvol0 at position 1048576 and size 1048576
Aborting.  Failed to wipe start of new LV.
WARNING: This metadata is NOT backed up.
TIMESTAMP ERROR minios: [screen_download.cc(162)] Could not repartition disk.  Unable to continue.