A few years back HP released a small notebook that was designed with the cloud in mind, the HP Stream 11. It's lightweight, good battery and looks pretty stylish. However, 'designed for the cloud' was a justification to put in a tiny 32GB hard drive. As Windows is generally quite a hungry beast for HDD space, the HP Stream rapidly filled up, becoming little more than a paperweight.

However, it's a perfect candidate for Chromebooks, so a quick install of Neverware and its good to go. That is, until the damned thing won't boot... Powers on, screen flashes, reboots.

Since I had a spare HP Stream, my first thought was to swap the hard drives. So opened up the laptop, and, erm, no hard drive. Or rather, the hdd is embedded into the motherboard, so swapping them over wasn't really an option.

Tried a HP hardware reset (unhook battery, hold power button for 30 seconds, turn back on). No dice. Ran the start up check on the RAM, no issues. Couldn't run the HDD check as it needed HP UEFI Support Environment installed. Trying to boot from the Hard Drive from the Boot Options menu gave the error message "Selected boot image did not authenticate", which pointed to Secure Boot. At this point, I had forgotten this laptop was no longer running windows, but figured that turning off Secure Boot was probably a good idea. Found a website with a handy guide, but following Method 1, Secure boot would not stay turned off. I would save the setting in BIOS, it would reboot, and Secure Boot would turn itself back on.

Out of frustration, I turned off Secure Boot, turned on Legacy Support, and also turned on POST Hotkey Delay to 5 seconds. Then on a reboot, a message appears asking for a code to be entered to turn off Secure Boot. Entered the code, and ChromeOS is back!

Long story short, if your HP Stream 11 isn't booting, it's worth:

1, Pressing esc on boot to bring up a start menu

2, Enter BIOS - System Configuration - Boot Options

3, Turn off Secure Boot

4, Turn on Legacy Support

5, Change the POST Hotkey Delay (sec) to 5 (or higher)

6, F10 Save and Exit

7, Enter the code to disable Secure Boot.