HP Pavillion DV9000 fried card :/

Ok, so I know the DV9000 has problems. I've had the laptop for 3.5yrs and at the end of last yr it died on me. I tried to find out the problem and eventually figured it was the overheating and badly manufactured design as so many other people with this laptop found. Even took it in for a fault assessment and they told me that the integrated graphics card was probably fried.

Thing is, the other day I bought a screwdriver set and decided to open up the laptop and take a look around and boot it up again and now I'm having second thoughts.

Firstly, if it was the graphic card that was fried, surely the hdd would still boot into windows? When I turn on the laptop, the screen goes grey / lights up (as it normally did when the laptop was working) but nothing much happens after that. I dont hear the hdd booting up and nothing really happens. All I hear is the fan working and eventually after 20min of nothing happening I just pulled the power cable out.

So I tried taking out the hdd and booting up. Nothing comes up on the display and nothing happens. Even if the hdd is out, should any sort of display come up? like surely the BIOS or even a screen saying "no hdd detected" should come up?

If it is the graphics card that is fried, does that mean that if I plug a secondary monitor into the monitor port on the laptop, it shouldnt display anything should it? or does the extra monitor port on the laptop run through a different circuit system than the main LCD screen on the laptop?

Thing that puzzles me is just that surely my harddrive should still boot up even if the integrated graphic card is fried?

Really loved my dv9000 and have found all these different articles on how to maybe revive it, but need to work out the exact problem before doing my exploratory surgery.

Thanks

 

It sounds like the usual fried NVIDIA integrated graphics chipset to me. Symptoms vary depending on where the solder break(s) happen. There are threads on how to temporarily get the notebook back up and running, such as this one:
dv9000 issue - Page 2
but I've found that without using expensive specialized gear to do a proper solder reflow, and even then, it's going to die again within a few months. I only buy notebooks with ATI graphics now. NVIDIA sold defective chips for ~3 years. The best solution is to sell the notebook as broken on eBay and put the money towards one of the new HP notebooks that are being rolled out next week.

 

Those motherboards have also nvidia chipset in addition to nvidia gpu. Both chips share same materials and both will fail eventually. It's just matter of luck which one goes first.

I was going to scrap my dv9014 for parts but decided to bake mobo in the oven first, result: it has been working since Most probably the motherboard will fail again sooner than later but at least it's working for now. Heavy undervolting and underclocking just in case.