Elitebook 8740W odd behaviour... advice please

hiya peeps,

We have a machine here, which is exhibiting really weird behaviour.

just looking for some tips before it's maybe sent back... sigh.

I've gone through the system with a fine tooth comb and cannot for the life of me understand why it is doing this behaviour.

ok.

first one

Once or twice a day, the system will just freeze, but when it does, it will fill the screen with a pastel colour, (usually purple, green or blue) and about 1cm down from the top of the screen, will be a line of colour which flickers.

The system is unresponsive, and needs to be hard reset.

second one.

Is a sporadic Stop 0x7F (c0000008) error, which never dumps to the hard drive, because... the harddrive disappears from the system altogether.

when it's rebooted, there will be no harddrive for about 35 seconds, then if i power off, wait 2-3 minutes, it'll come back on fine.

I've checked memory, temps are fine, system is identical to several others in the office, same windows OS image. but yea, any ideas?

Sio

 

Mobo is gone it seems

 

hiya Aiki

blah you reckon?

thats annoying. any ideas on what causes it?

and have you seen this situation before?

 

Could you try re-flashing the BIOS? I'd also remove the BIOS battery for 1min.
Also, the Elitebooks are known to accumulate static charge, did you do a power drain?

No, I have never seen such a combination of issues before.

 

Hi, Sio

Run the continuous Run-In test included in the BIOS Diagnostics Tools (it's recommended you already have installed the latest UEFI tools). As far I know, this test is infinite, but if there is a hardware problem, the test should fail at a certain point. Leave the test running for at least 12 hours. If there is no hardware issues, the test should not end until you press the ESC key. The good thing is this test is executed in an isolated environment, so you can determine with high accuracy if it's a hardware or software (Windows and drivers) problem.

On a side note, it seems Aiki is pretty right: it's almost sure a hardware failure. Read this case; the user finally replaced RAM and motherboard to workaround the problem.

Also do not forget to run the Self Tests for the installed hard drives (SSD or HDD). You can run these tests from the Diagnostics Menu of BIOS. It could be a disk failure too...

Good luck mate

 

hiya guys, thanks for the support

Ran the HDD checks and it failed at 90% in on the long test.

The UEFI stuff i've not done as yet, as it's not on the disc image, so am looking at getting a modified image to put the UEFI tools on.

As for the bios, can't reflash due to F.20 being bit flagged to prevent it.

Discharging, will do today.

the annoying thing is if it just did a minidump i'd be able to see whats triggering it, it's seriously lame. but i've never had this series of events before.

Pastel coloured screen is usually a sign of bad GPU ram or RAM corruption or a complete fault on the motherboard, but there is no reason for it as it's been working fine for over a year. its running a 2800M, but the temps not over 45 (she's been well serviced and looked after)

yea, total mystery.

 

This seems bad, maybe a bad sectors problem. Download HDDScan, put it on a folder of your drive and run the Surface Tests > Read Test. This tool is very reliable and you will know if there is a surface problem or not with 100% accuracy. Also it will report you any delays (sectors read over 50ms) found during the process (delays are not bad sectors but they are not good, they indicate that a sector is hardly readable). If the system drive is the same as the tested drive, don't run any application during the test, because applications accessing the disk could produce false delays.

Don't worry, UEFI Tools will run even on an USB pen drive.
Download this SoftPaq and install it on a pen drive (actually on any removable device). Then restart the machine and BIOS will automatically search for the tools on any available device when you press F2 at the startup menu. Remember you must plug the pen drive in a 2.0 port (you already know 3.0 is not supported). Note the UEFI tools have more in-depth test tools than the builtin on BIOS.

 

Quick update, done the discharge test, problem still occurs. Have a new hard drive in there now (will be replacing that one methinks!)

She's running the UEFI atm hidden, thanks for that, you saved me making a new disk image!

she's 55 minutes in, so we'll see how long she lasts.

Sio

 

well, i'm staring at a pile of (slightly charred) 8740w.

I don't know when but one of the workers stopped the test at around 3 hours in, so i restarted it today.

It had been running for 11 hours, then something gave. a pop and a fizzle later, the infamous blue smoke/flux smell appeared, and it shut down.

Its not turned on since, and its on its way to being repaired.

If it had gone like this on a render it would have been somewhat problematic, so thanks all.

 

You're welcome I'm glad to help you. You already have diagnosed your machine with a 100% hardware failure (not Windows or drivers failure). As you can see, this isolated environment made by HP is very useful.