Please help with my HP Pavilion DV1000

[Guest]

About a year ago my computer went to the land of BSOD. I was unable to run XP at all without it crashing. I couldn't run it in safe mode... nothing.

My husband recently found the software that came with the computer so I managed to change the BIOS settings to boot to a CD and I busted out the XP recovery CD. 😀

I went to the recovery console and ran chkdsk /r and was told by the computer that there were unrecoverable errors on the hard drive. I decided that the only thing left to do would be to format the hard drive and start fresh. I did a full format in the event that I had contracted a virus or worm or something.

I did so, and when I attempted to reinstall Windows XP, the computer told me that certain files could not be copied onto the hard drive. I cleaned the disk, tried again, and then was told that another file couldn't be copied. It was a different file each time. 🙁

So back to the recovery console I went, ran chkdsk /r again and NOW the darn thing get stuck in a repair loop! It makes it up to like 80% and then kicks back to 50% and just does this over and over. It never repairs. What's up with THAT?

The BSOD error is also different all the time. It's all the standard ones.

I'm ripping my hair out here. The laptop was less than 2 years old when it died.

If anyone can give me any clues, that would be awesome. I've used two seperate legitimate copies of Windows XP now trying to fix this laptop and get it working again and it's always the same thing.

Do I need to just bury it?

HELP!

 

[retlveit]

August of 07 when my HP pavillion was 11 months and 3 weeks old it did something very similiar. I was able to acces "my computer" in safe mode and the memory was 25GB's instead of the 100 or whatever it was. I contacted our friends in India and did the language thing for a while until I finally managed to get a English speaking case manager. His learned opinion was my hard drive was faulty, so he send me a new one. I installed it (very simple) and Violla! still 25 GB's. So I sent it back and he sent me a new one. This two more times until I was convinced simple or not I must be installing the HD incorrectly, and took the computer to Staples and paid them to install the latest one. Same thing, only 25 GB's, also they informed me the mother board was bad. I paid them something like a hundred bucks to retrieve my data from the original hard drive onto an external drive (they got about 80% of it). I notified the case manager of Staples verdict, he sent me a empty box to forward the computer to an HP repair facility, telling me it would be about two weeks. After three months still no computer, my case manager wasn't answering the phone, so as a last resort I went to the HP home page and found a link to the CEO. Yeah, sure, I thought, but what the heck. I sent him/her a message detailing all this and where the heck is my computer? Concidence or not, two weeks later I received a brand new HP pavillion dv 6500 running winVista. So I wasn't mad at HP anymore. And I actually felt warm and fuzzy toward them when two weeks after that I received the old computer back, repaired.

So check your warranty, if it's two years or less you may be in luck, hope so!

 

[frozenlead]

Check if it's under warranty, of course.

File errors can be caused by a number of things, but the main causes of it I've found to be:

1.Bad memory
2.Damaged CD media
3.Damaged hard disk

Since the media is new, I'm going to assume it's not that - unless the disc is overly scratched. Check.

Reseat the RAM would be the next step. There's a compartment at the bottom of your machine usually bound with 1 or 2 screws. Unscrewing them and removing the panel will reveal the memory modules. They're held in place by two clips on either side - simply hold the metal clips away from the module, and it should pop up. Remove it at a 45 degree angle - they don't pop perpendicular to the machine. Then just either switch the modules, or put the one you have (if there's only one) into the next slot or same slot it came from (shouldn't matter which). Boot the machine up after putting it back together. See what happens.

Else, run memtest to see if your memory is damaged or malfunctioning.
http://www.memtest.org/

If those turn out everything's okay and the system is still messing up, your hard disk is likely damaged.