Need a bit of help to revive an old chromebook

Support
1

I’m really stuck and could use some advice.

I found this really old HP Chromebook 14, model Falco C2B-C3A-H9X

Problem: Booting Issues

Everytime I’m trying to boot it up, I’m getting this error -

ChromeOS is missing or damaged

Please insert a recovery USB stick or SD card

Recovery reason: 0x5b No bootable kernel found on disk

What I’ve tried:

  1. Created a recovery USB using the official ChromeOS Recovery Utility for my exact model.

Inserted the USB, went through the recovery process.

When trying to perform a system recovery,

After verifying the recovery media, I get:

System recovery in progress

And then a few seconds later, I get:

An unexpected error has occurred, please refer to this URL: Google’s website to chromeOS recovery

2. Tried to remove WP write protection screw to see if there’s any luck but nope

3. Tried multiple USB drives, nothing works.

4. Tried turning off OS VERIFICATION, and attempted to reinstall the using the recovery media again, that should me “system recovery is progress” and it stayed there for hours and did nothing

Can someone help me out with this?

2

FALCO is known for having SSD failures, which is likely what happened here. If you look at the recovery USB on a Linux machine, there is a recovery log that will tell you exactly what the issue is. Open up the device and swap out the m.2-SATA SSD with another. While you’re at it, remove the firmware WP screw, and then you can restore ChromeOS and flash the firmware, and then install a usable OS.

3

Thank you so much for replying, I found a “recovery.log” file in the USB Drive, I’ll attach it here

4

lots of drive errors starting around line 2180, that’s drive is indeed dead/failing.

5

so an M.2 replacement might do the job?

6

yes, already said to do that :slight_smile:

7

Thank you so much, MrChromebox. I managed to install coreboot on my Falco, could you recommend me a distro that runs well on this?

8

it’s compatible with everything, so just something lightweight I guess. I don’t distro hop so can’t really advise there