HP DV9000 Hard Drive Temperatures

It's a pain it won't boot from the second bay, which would be nice but only applies to the dv9000 series. When you say "GRUB" doesn't see it, what do you mean? Are you booting off a CD or USB disk? Otherwise GRUB is on the drive that's in the second bay, and it's the system that can't see the drive... it has nothing to do with GRUB.

 

I setup a USB token to boot Grub, and shifted my hard drive to bay 2. However, once Grub starts up, it only sees 1 hd, and that's the flash drive. When I moved the hard drive back to bay 1, it sees 2 hds.

Stupid HP and their shoddy engineering and support. Why don't they ship these things with bay 2 as the primary drive, or better yet have adequate cooling on the current bay?

I wonder, does anyone have a second drive bay adapter? Would just having that stuffed in be enough to enable the second drive? Because I'm pretty sure this is something as silly as HP programmed/engineered the drive bays such that bay 2 doesn't function unless bay 1 already is.

If it weren't for these hard drive brackets you need, I'd just stuff in an old CF card into bay in order to swap.

 

i recently got my dv9000 back from hp repair (dead c: drive, broken heatsink, nad dead lcd) and now my ir remote doesn't work. could it be burned out from the excessive heat? or do you think they just forgot to reattach the ir sensor when re-assembling my notebook?

i'd rather not send my computer away again. any way i can open up myself and try to fix?

 

If it can't see the other drive then it probably needs some sort of driver to work with the SATA controller. I'm not familiar enough with GRUB, but I don't think it supports these types of drivers?

It would be nice if HP would add some logic to the BIOS, like "no OS in bay 1, check bay 2".

The other drive adapter would not enable this to work, and it's just an adapter and bracket, there's no other magic in there that could unlock some type of functionality like this.

 

No, I don't think it's a driver issue. It works with precisely the same drive if I have a configuration where I put it in Bay 1 and Bay 2 is empty. It is only when Bay 1 is empty and Bay 2 has the drive that it doesn't work. That suggests to me that somewhere along the line (either software or hardware) HP hard-coded the controller so that if there is nothing in Bay 1, it doesn't bother to enable Bay 2.

It's a long-shot, but that's why I theorize the other drive adapter could possibly work. If there's some sort of hardware logic where it doesn't enable Bay 2 if there isn't something physically plugged into Bay 1, like a switch, then conceivably just having something jammed in there would enable Bay 2. However, I do agree that it's unlikely, and the "switch" is probably actually in the BIOS.

 

Definitely an interesting theory though.

 

Hi,

I just purchased a custom HP dv9500t 2.4 and read about hd temps here. I see that some users changed hd's out. I bought 2 hitachi 200gb 7200 and trying to install them..BUT... I am having trouble pulling the HD out of either bay 1 or 2 by pulling the small plastic tab...nothing moves.

What am I doing wrong here.??? (according to hp pdf manual that all is needed!

Thanks for a reply...


pgifish


btw bay 1 gets very hot ...bay 2 is much cooler

 

You should be able to lift them out. Just make sure to start lifting from the end away from the connector. You might need to pry it out a little with a screwdriver, but don't pull it too hard or you'll break something.

 

I tried it and no luck both drives are stuck to tied in there.
now I have 2 options..

sent it to HP service or

bring it back to Costco where I purchased it it's within the 3 months satisfaction garantee time!

 

i did this myself a few days ago... it was kind of "stuck" or so i thought so, i kept thinking i was going to break that plastic tab but after a few minutes of struggling i was able to remove the drive.. just pull a bit harder than you "think you should" lol, it worked for me!

//Alex//

 

orev

Thanks for your help & the great post for not having to call MS India to have reactivate the os again


avillabon

Thanks for telling me to give it "a little help" to pull out the h/d's. It worked. The little plastic tab is cr**p but a Robagrip with a little nonslip tap did the trick!

Thanks again guys..laptop is running great now.

 

I got a CompactFlash -> SATA Adapter on eBay. Stuck it in with a Sandisk Ultra II CF card in my primary drive bay. Using GRUB on a USB key, on boot I swap the drives and boot Vista of the hard drive.

Hard drive temperature now hovers around a comfortable 40 C, a decrease of 15 C. Only HP knows why bay 2 isn't the primary drive bay.

Unfortunately, something about this arrangement is throwing off Vista on bootup, and it sits there scanning the CF drive in bay 1 for 5minutes before booting. That's annoying. The cooler hard drive is nice though, as it being able to use my laptop on my lap without burning myself.

 

Interesting setup. Did you also get the drive adapter somewhere? How are you connecting the CF adapter to the laptop? Also, why do you need GRUB on a USB key? Is the CF card not bootable for some reason? It sounds like an interesting project.

 

Yep, also picked up the stupid HP mounting bracket/adapter on eBay. Thus it's HP bracket -> SATA CF Adapter -> CF card.

About GRUB on the USB key, that's a holdover from prior in this thread when I was experimenting with GRUB to see if I could just move my true hard drive over to bay 2 with nothing in bay 1. I'm gonna put GRUB on the CF drive at some point, but I've been toying around with installing an Ubuntu Linux dual boot, but it's been giving me install problems, but I'll get around to booting off the CF card at some point.

 

I have a dv9743cl with two hard drives. Drive 1 is located under the touchpad. It gets extremely hot to the touch. Drive 2 seems to stay very cool to the touch. Obviously, the drive in bay 2 should actually be the root OS drive as it is located further away from the processor and graphics cards. Has anyone tried modifying the bios or customizing a bios for this purpose? Second, has anyone opened the case to determine if the cables could be moved for this purpose? I'm running Win Vista.

I moved the win virtual cache file and temporary internet cache file to Drive 2. This seems to reduce the activity, but Drive 1 is still hot to the touch on the underside of the case. Are there any case mods to improve cooling in this area?

 

Something that I finally (After months of working on the problem of my secondary drive not being seen, or worse, being seen for a short period of time and then *POOF* disappearing from everywhere, BIOS Windows, everything! I was running identical drives in both bays (to avoid any compatibility issues). How FRUSTRATING!!!! And HP tech support sucks!! Sending it into them resolved nothing, they simply said it works and returned it to me. I work on computers for a living and figured they were smoking something, to my dismay, I was right.

I finally found the cause in a whitepaper one day while researching this problem. The problem was that the second drive bay cannot utilize a drive running at 3 G/sec., it HAS TO BE clipped to 1.5 G/Sec. You can check with you drive manufacturer or simply look at the top of the drive for a jumper setting, but you WILL need a small jumper designed for laptop drives, others will not work safely. Once I clipped the drive to the slower speed, it has been running like a champ ever since (at least the last three months or so). THANKS FOR NO HELP HP!!!!!! Why they would design a laptop that could use two drives and then not give both interfaces the same connection speed is beyond me.

 

hi i have purchased the hp pavilion dv9000 laptop about 19mths ago after the first 9 mths my hard drive went here we are 9 mths later and yes my hard drive went again no warrenty i had to purchase a new hard drive still havent got it yet but was wondering if anyone else has had this problem with theres...maybe the high temps did this to the drives it does get pretty hot on the bottom of the laptop when i have it on my legs please send me info on related issues or something of simular interest thank you for your time..

 

edit. i updated to latest bios but still had heating issues. i have since fully disassembled the laptop, cleaned the heat sink pipe (totally clogged with dust), and installed a copper shim (google dv9000 copper shim mod) with thermal compound on the gpu. all of this has reduced the temp of the laptop considerably. even still, the plastic cover over the primary drive still gets extremely hot. the ventilation is poor to say the least. the ideal solution would be to install an auxiliary fan in the primary drive bay, possibly drilling vent holes in the removable cover. a larger primary drive could be installed in the secondary drive bay which would totally eliminate the need for two drives. unfortunately, as mentioned in this thread, there is no way to configure the bios to boot from a drive in the second sata bay. if someone has implemented such a solution, please post details.

 

I am not sure if people still have this laptop or not but I've been trying to work on the issues surrounding this laptop (from heat issues to boot issues). This laptop is quite possibly the most annoying hardware I've worked on just because of the stupidity of the people who designed it.

Let's list a few:
-Placing a primary hard drive next to a powerful graphics processor
-Locked primary hard drive selection in BIOS
-Useless BIOS updates
-PhoenixBIOS
-Poor ventilation

The list goes on. Anyway, I've taken some of what people have said here into account and here are my results so far:

-CF card in the primary slot using a SATA adapter prevents a pre-installed Windows XP from booting (even using GRUB). The card must be removed for Windows XP to be happy.

-Copper shims and copper penny (before 1980) (if a thick enough shim is not found) is great solution to keeping unit cool.

-Extended battery also helps to keep GPU and other components significantly cooler

-I am working on getting my CF card to work with Windows XP. If that fails, I may upgrade to Windows 7 or may consider reinstalling Windows XP with CF card in primary bay during installation.

Right now, I boot into Windows XP using a Linux Mint disk and an empty primary slot. The disk allows me to boot into my local hard disk. Linux looks for hard drives then allows it to boot (something HP's PhoenixBIOS fails at doing). My temps (in degrees C) are:

Core 2 Duo Core 1: 41
Core 2 Duo Core 2: 41
WD 160GB HD: 40
NV GeForce 8600GS: 55
System Temp: 42

*These temps are from CPUID Hardware Monitor (great resource and FREE!)

My temps used to be around the 80's before cleaning and adding the copper shims, which is ridiculous!

JAmerican

 

I guess I am the only one left with this laptop. This laptop is actually quite good, if you know how to mod it to perfection. I solved the second hard drive boot problem with a custom solution of my own. Check it out below. I am posting this using the laptop which has booted using the custom cable I created below. I will post the details on my site (jamerican.net) in the coming weeks/months if time permits. Post if you are interested.







Regards,

JAmerican