HP Pavillion dv6000 - bad hard drive or mobo?

nitsirk

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Jun 25, 2009
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I am trying to fix a friends HP Pavillion dv6000 notebook. The sticker on the bottom says it came with XP media center edition but he was running Vista on it for quite some time. One day when he turned on his computer his operating system was "lost" so I gave him my Vista 64 disk and he loaded it up with no problem. It ran fine for a couple days and then Vista was "lost" again and would not reload from the CD. I now have the notebook and tried the same with the same results. The Vista install fails. I also tried an XPSP2 disk which also fails. The hard drive cannot be formatted.

I downloaded the Seagate diagnostic tools and found a bunch of errors on the hard drive. It says they are repaired; however, when I run the test again, the same errors come up.

Now, all this lead me to believe that the hard drive had failed. I bought a new hard drive and installed it; however, when I go to install Vista, it shows that the hard drive is 0MB and I can't get anywhere.

I suppose it is possible that the new hard drive was bad too; however, it seems unlikely. Is it possible the motherboard is causing all these problems and that maybe the motherboard is bad and not the hard drive? How can I tell? Are there some kind of diagnostics that can be run on the mobo?

I told him if his mobo is dead it's not worth fixing it but I want to be sure before I tell him to give up on the machine. Thanks to anyone who can help me diagnose.
 

nitsirk

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Jun 25, 2009
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If I am able to format the hard drive in another computer it concludes that the hard drive is good and gives me reasonable certainty that the mobo is bad.

If I am not able to format the hard drive in another computer it concludes that the hard drive is corrupt the the mobo might be okay.

Are these fair assumptions?
 

frozenlead

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Eh, not really. Motherboards and hard disks are very complex - sometimes a pair of them just won't work well together. I have a motherboard in an older desktop that throws a fit if you don't use both IDE channels. You can see if there's a BIOS update available for your board, also.

All in all, you should be able to get the disk working with your machine.