HP Probook 4720s keeps rebooting after various repair attempts

NethNek

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Jan 11, 2014
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This is a friends laptop. It was having issues communicating with a bluetooth speaker. I uninstalled the bluetooth drivers, restarted the laptop to find it crashed during the boot sequence. Then kept rebooting before the windows logo appears.
I removed the SSD, copied all data off, reformatted and put it back in. Same problem. Using a bootable USB I've accessed the command prompt in the Repair option and tried some options I've read on this and other forums, nothing has helped. They all came out OK. The harddrive appears to be fine. I've tried to install windows again. Sometimes the laptop crashes 10s after pressing the On button, sometimes it lets me get into the BIOS and crashes shortly after varying lengths of time. I've started the windows installation process multiple times from the bootable USB and the computer crashes at roughly 10% of the 'Expanding Windows Files' phase.

I've also removed the battery after disconnecting the power cable and held down the power button for 30s. I've read everything I can on this issue and can't find a solution.
 
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mauxie

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Dec 19, 2013
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this sounds like classic bios fault behavior.
check the model and serial of the machine from the bios info.
check the bios version also.
then look for bios updates from the manufacturer.
beware all other bios sources if you don't want a paperweight
that has a keyboard.

I had a qosmio that acted this way and it wasn't fixable
(someone did me a favor and stole it)
 

NethNek

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Jan 11, 2014
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Thanks for you reply. So you think updating the BIOS could fix whatever is it that happened once I uninstalled the bluetooth drivers?
 

mauxie

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Dec 19, 2013
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I have no confidence that uninstalling the Bluetooth drivers had anything to do with the symptoms that
you are experiencing. Bluetooth is a peripheral that is not germane to system startup.
btw, I just remembered, go into bios and choose default configuration and try that before
updating the bios. also, if you have install media, partition the drive and put an install partition
just large enough to hold the files and reinstall system from that partition( always more reliable
than usb)

if it reliably reboots itself, it could also be a bad memory location.
remember that all zeros in machine language is usually an unconditional
transfer to absolute memory location zero(reboot)

if you can swap out the memory, try that first.
or swap the mem cards if there are two of them.

so memory,
reset bios
install from partition
update bios

I would try these
 

NethNek

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Jan 11, 2014
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I've swapped the two memory cards. Booted from USB, the 'Expanding Windows Files' progressed to around 90% then the laptop crashed. It used to crash at 10%. I then downloaded the relevant BIOS update and formatted a USB using the downloaded exe from HP. Booted to this to receive the error BOOTMGR is missing. I already had used Bootrec /fixboot command after booting from the Windows 7 USB before this. I'm going to go into the terminal again as soon as my USB is finished being reformatted as a Windows 7 USB. I need to set the small 100MB partition as the active one I think. (I think I've already done this, but clearly something isn't right)

I've deleted what I had originally written. It wasn't that important really. Now the 100MB is set to active, the 111GB partition is set to inactive. Should I just try and update the BIOS again? If I get the BOOTMGR is missing fault again what should I do? No matter what I've done so far, the laptop either crashes within 10s of starting up, then restarting, or it crashes after somewhere between 5 and 15mins after starting up, sometimes closer to 5, sometimes not. I'm going to bring it into a laptop repair shop tomorrow, but I'd like to fix this myself if I can. Does this all sound like something that someone who calls themselves a laptop/pc repair person would be able to solve?
 

mauxie

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Dec 19, 2013
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first off, don't get bent out of shape, cause you won't think any more clearly.
second I have always had iffy results booting from a usb. maybe I was not
clear when I said you should create an install partition(4gig) on the hard drive
and reinstall windows from that partition. create the partition, transfer the
install media files to the partition and re-install windows from that partition
on the hard drive. it will create new boot mgr and mbr's which are not
always possible to de-corrupt from windows repair. did you do a hard
drive test run? didn't think to ask before. if the drive is ok, install
from the drive tends to be far more reliable than usb. boot mgr
problems are frequent with mobo configs that the usb creators "don't
like".

also usb installs can also be iffy if the drive is plugged into a 3.0(blue) port.
look for a port with the old fashioned usb symbol.
 
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