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    HP Pavillion dv6550 won't boot with optical drive installed

    Discussion in 'HP' started by K.I.T.T., Aug 19, 2010.

  1. K.I.T.T.

    K.I.T.T. Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hi guys,

    Got a bit a of a weird situation here. A friend at uni said her laptop wouldn't boot up and I told her to bring it in and I'd have a look at it.

    Basically, once turned on it would stay stuck on the hp screen for ages without doing anything. Eventually (after 2-3 mins), it would go to a screen saying something along the lines of windows (vista) didn't start properly last time, blah blah. If you chose start windows normally it'd work fine, but if you tried repairing the install, it would give a stop error and BSOD.

    Here's the weird thing. I thought it was a hardware issue so removed most of the components and added them back one by one. If the optical drive is removed, the laptop works fine, and it boots up normally without a delay and Windows runs fine.

    However with the optical drive attached, it takes ages to POST and results in the symptoms mentioned earlier. Curiously, it'll also take ages to get into the BIOS after you've pressed F10. This doesn't happen if the optical drive is removed. This happens regardless of whether the hard drive is installed or not.

    At first I thought it was a hard drive issue, but it POSTs and boots up (and goes into the BIOS) fine with just the hard drive as mentioned earlier. Something seems screwy with the optical drive. I tried swapping the optical drive from my own laptop into my friend's laptop, but the same thing happens. It just doesn't want to play nice with an optical drive installed.

    I'm stumped. Any help would be much appreciated!

    Thanks,
    Ash :)
     
    K.I.T.T., Aug 19, 2010
    #1
  2. timtravel42

    timtravel42 Notebook Virtuoso

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    Is the CD drive set to boot before the HDD? That might fix part of it
     
    timtravel42, Aug 19, 2010
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  3. Vanko

    Vanko Notebook Consultant

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    Yea, open the CD once you turn it on and if your windows boots its from the CD drive, then just do what v3loc1ty2.0 said.
     
    Vanko, Aug 21, 2010
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