# HP Laptop crash problem, is it the hard drive?



## jperro87 (Jan 10, 2007)

Hey and thanks for checking this out - I have an HP notebook (DV1340) I picked up about 1yr and 4 months ago. 

The Problem. After running for about 5 minutes, the laptop flashes the blue screen of death - the physical memory dump - and then shuts down. It then tries to restart on its own, which shows the windows XP screen loading and then goes black (no backlight or anything). After that, if I try to start up the laptop it acts like its powering on and all the lights go on up front and on the keyboard, but the screen stays black like described previously. 

Over this past summer, the notebook was doing the SAME EXACT thing and went to HP and they replaced the heatsink fan, and since then (~5 months) it's been fine. Something tells me its not the same part, i mean, what are the odds? I feel like its the hard drive, just a hunch, but how can i check? I'd send it to HP again, but now its out of warranty.

***by the way, resetting the RAM allows this cycle to begin again. If I could get it to work again, is it worth trying to run PC Wizard 2006?

If anyone has any idea how to test or what to fix, please let me know since I head back to college in a week! :upset: 

Joe
HP DV1340, 1.73 GHZ Centrino 740, 1GB RAM, 100GB HD, WinXP


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## hwm54112 (Oct 10, 2005)

Hello Joe, Welcome to TSF,

The odds of it being the same exact thing could be very good. There's been a few HP models that were prone to repeated failures of the heat sink assembles themselves. I'd suspect that or ram before a hard drive issue.

Since resetting (reseating ?) the ram seems to be a factor, I’d suggest running memtest86 hard-drive-diagnostic-utilities and a can of air to clean out the memory slot when you reseat it and avoid touching the contacts on the memory stick. Running the diags will tell a little more than just whether ram is bad.

When you're running the tests, try removing the battery. It can act as a heat sink, insulator and a contributor to keep heat in the laptop


Bill


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## jperro87 (Jan 10, 2007)

Thanks for the welcome, i hope you guys can help me through this royal PITA. 

Actually, I did run memtest86 for the RAM and it passed - oh and I also did mean reseating lol, sorry. 

I will try running the hitachi version of the hard drive tester since my model uses a Toshiba hdd just to see what sort of results I get. Thanks for the link.

Although I consider myself tech savvy, I'm not used to opening up notebook components besides RAM or hard disks or something, but I do have access to a friend who works at a Staples repair center who is comfortable with opening it up. Is there anyway to check, test, or look at that and tell if its a bad assembly or fan or something? Thanks in advance,

Joe


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## jperro87 (Jan 10, 2007)

First time trying to run the hard disk fitness test froze the computer. I choose Advanced rather than Quick Test and it seemed to do a few quick functions then got to "Analyzing Media" and was probably less than 5% complete before it locked up at LBA:0x4035C0 (4208064). 

I powered it down hard and when I turned it back on, no screen life as usual. Should I reseat the RAM and try again?


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## hwm54112 (Oct 10, 2005)

If reseating the ram gets it to boot, do it. if you have an xp install disk, boot to the  recovery console and run chkdsk /r or start up in safe mode and run chkdsk /r. The first crash may have damaged the file system. Chkdsk may fix it.

If you still cannot run the diagnostics, pull the hard drive out and install it as a slave in a desktop using a Notebook drive adapter and run chkdsk and the diags on the drive


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## jperro87 (Jan 10, 2007)

Now it doesn't seem to matter what I do, I can't get the machine running again. If someone were to take a guess here, approximately what sort of chance is there that this thing has a bad motherboard from like a blown capicator or something? I'm going to try to test the hard drive by setting it up as a slave but I have a feeling it might not be the hard drive...

Again, all I'm getting is the lights on the keyboard and the front which show the hard drive working and the power on, but a dead screen. When it does load correctly, some more lights go on (like the wi-fi and touchpad), but that doesn't seem to be as easy as before to happen again. Thanks


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## jperro87 (Jan 10, 2007)

Correction, i got it on.

Passed the hard drive test. Stayed on through chkdsk, both basic and advanced tests of the hard drive. Whyyyyyyyy is this problem so intermittent rather than obvious?

Ran PC Wizard 2006. I'm not sure if it has any tools to diagnose hardware problems, but CPU temp was approximately 54*F, +/- 3* and HD temp was constant at about 40*F. It was on for over an hour straight. What is the probability that me having to reseat the RAM all the time gets it to turn on means that the RAM is bad despite its pass of the memtest86?

Sorry bout all these posts,

Joe


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## jperro87 (Jan 10, 2007)

*What does this blue screen error mean?*

Hey, you might have seen my other post about my hp laptop crash, but since I dont think its getting too much attention I thought I'd post this separate. (It's here if you'd like to view it.)

Anyways, when I'm trying to run Hot CPU Tester Pro I'm getting a blue screen crash about 15 min. in, it says:

Technical Information:

*** STOP: 0x0000000A (0xD49886C2, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0x8052D78A)

Beginning dump of physical memory

Any takers?


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## JP198780 (Dec 29, 2006)

u only get the stop error when u run that?

and this thread is probrably gonna be closed, cause u already made a thread...

anyway, when u get a Blue Screen, that usually means some sort of hardware problem, RAM, HD, mobo, overheating etc..


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## jperro87 (Jan 10, 2007)

Thanks, i figured it was a hardware issue.


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## hwm54112 (Oct 10, 2005)

Hot cpu is a burn in utility meant to put maximum stress on your computer. Does it tell you what component it is testing when it's testing it?


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## dai (Jul 2, 2004)

only post the same problem once
threads merged


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## dai (Jul 2, 2004)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314063#


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