Interesting/Frustrating problem.

[davidparry12]

Hello, my first time around this community, but I thought you may be able to help me. I purchased a new laptop, a HP Pavillion dv7. It came with two 750gb harddrives, and I thought, as the windows installation was on one, and the other seemed clear, that I would install a dual-boot setup with ubuntu. I burned an ubuntu disk and ran the setup. This is where things get strange. You see, I fell asleep midway through the setup, and awoke to my computer resting in an extremely buggy and confusing state at the ubuntu desktop. I shut down the computer as it was refusing to make sense. When I started it again, it went to the grub boot menu and tragically, it lacked any reference to windows apart from the windows recovery partition. upon this disturbing discovery i tried to boot into ubuntu. this also failed to work, as ubuntu disagreed with my hardware and would only give me a blank screen. amidst attempting to debug this, which only involved changing boot setting for ubuntu my computer threw in the towel and proceeded to boot to a blank screen with a non-blinking underscore in the top left. a rather extreme degreation from a fully functioning computer two hours beforehand. now i can do nothing, as it wont go into bios or really do anything whatsoever.

anyone have any idea of what i could do?

 

[Tyler-767]

If you can I would return it. Play dumb and just say u can no longer afford to keep it blah blah. As long as its all in the box they'll just take it and give ur money back. Then go to another store and buy another one.

 

[cmichael138]

Did you try this:

http/h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01689926.pdf

Page 97

 

[davidparry12]

I would, but alas, i cannot enter the bios. to give an example of how my computer is functioning. i turn it on, a nonblinking underscore i in the corner of the screen, all else is black. i can click every single button on my keyboard in sequence and nothing will happen. the cd tray pops out, though i cannot boot from cd.

im basically looking for anyone to give me any glimmer of hope that my hardware didn't explode randomly.

if it is the case that my hardware massively failed, is it probable that it was a manufactoring error, and was no cause by attempting a duel boot setup?

 

[beenthere]

If you can I would return it. Play dumb and just say u can no longer afford to keep it blah blah. As long as its all in the box they'll just take it and give ur money back. Then go to another store and buy another one.

Yeah, that's a real ethical way to go thru life...

HP usually has a recovery option partitioned on the HD. If you can't access that, HP can supply you with a recovery CD.

 

[cmichael138]

It sounds like the recovery partition was erased so you'll need to follow beenthere's recommendation and order a recovery CD. Your hardware should be okay.

 

[davidparry12]

So I thought about it for awhile, and i think I figured out what happened. The windows boot sequence was unaccessable/didn't exist following my attempted Ubuntu install, as GRUB couldn't find it. I was attempting to reinstall ubuntu so I could at least access ubuntu so I would have something to work with. The installer was sitting on a loading scene for a long time, and I assumed it had buggered, so I closed my computer's lid, thinking it would chew through the loading screen while closed, and it shut down. My problem then arose apon the next boot. So I think I may be right to assume that the GRUB/Ubuntu files on the drive were being overwritten/erased by the attempted Ubuntu reinstall, and following that, there was no GRUB to go to, nor the windows boot partition, thus my computer sits doing nothing.

so, if that made any sense : if there is no boot sequence for the computer to use, will it not load the screen which gives access to the bios? It typically has a large HP symbol and a "Press escape to enter BIOs" type thing before initiating the boot sequence.

 

[davidparry12]

btw, thank you all very much for your assistance.