HP dv4t not detecting hard drive, please help!

Hello, its been just a little over a year since I've bought my HP dv4t, and of course the problems start as soon as my warranty has ended.. It's been working fairly fine most of the year, and then just all of a sudden while not even doing anything of importance on computer last week I got a blue screen error..

Ever since then I have had so much problems. At first it just started out with closing the screen and reopening it crashed the laptop in a couple minutes..

The main problem now is, it just does not detect the hard drive when booting up! Sometimes (rarely) it does though.. I thought it was a windows problem, so I did fresh clean install of Windows 7 and reformatted the hard drive. Then I ran CHKDSK and it did it stuff and said volume clean at the end.. It worked perfectly for a couple of hours, was able to close screen and open with no problems. I downloaded "Hard drive sentinel" to monitor my hdd health, and it said 90% which is apparently excellent. Yet as I was installing adobe reader, it crashed, got the blue screen of death and has not been able to boot up since

Can anyone tell what is the problem with it? Anyone else have similar problem? I've tried to reformat again with CD but it doesnt even recognize any drive to install on..

Important thing to note is that, in the BIOS screen when i run the HARD DISK TEST, it does recognize it! So i dont understand why it doesn't load the operating system or cant see the hard drive anywhere else!!

What is at fault even? Is the motherboard dead? Althought the bios screen loads fine so does that mean its OK? Is it the hard drive? CHKDSK and the hdd health monitor thing said it was ok right before the crashes..

Please help, I have my first computer science lab in like 2 days with my laptop breaking just a couple days before it with barely any money left to buy a new laptop

 

Also I just ran the HARD DISK SELF TEST, and the computer always passes the QUICK test, but on the long test the computer always freezes at 56%?? What does this mean??

 

HDD is broken and needs to be replaced.

 

Ok, well I guess that's better than some other part of the computer. Does this rule out motherboard being messed up? I'm just hoping I don't buy HDD and it still doesn't work since I don't have much money atm..

I'm not really familiar with laptop hard drives, would any 2.5" hard drive work with the HP laptop? Also is there any guides to removing it/replacing it correctly?

Would this work with it, and is it reliable/durable HDD? I'm just wondering since it's so cheap compared to the others..

Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus 5400.6 ST9320325AS 320GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

THanks

 

If you want to be certain it's the drive, install Seagate's Seatools: | Seagate

It works on other brand drives too. Sometimes Quick test isn't enough, as drive may have physical errors not yet detected by smart sensor. Run the long test. Altough I'm already pretty sure it's just the drive gone bad.

Replacing is easy, hdd cover is held by one or two screws and when you get it open, drive is probably in a metal cage with few more screws. Unscrew them and install cage on the new drive, then plug the drive in the laptop. It takes more time to type this than actually do it

And practically all drives you can buy today will work.

 

Thanks KLF for the help! Ill try that seagate tool first

 

Ahhh, I ran seatools and it failed the quick test in like 4 seconds so thats not good lol. Running the long test now..

I guess I'll be replacing the HDD then, dunno how this happened.. Is it possible that the hard drive crashed based on me downloading something and getting a virus or something like that?

 

Well I ran the Seagate full test, and it too stopped at 56%! Found 99 errors then stopped..

so yea i supppose ill replace it

thanks!

 

In short. No.

Either it was bad drive all the way from the factory or it could have had something like a small bump some time before problems began, something that started the drive going bad.

 

Thanks man, big help. I bought the new HDD today at best buy, they accidentally sold me their Seagate 320 GB 7200 rpm for the price of the 5400 pm 250 GB by mistake so I lucked out there at least I guess lol

I've run the seatools on it the first thing and it's 100% no errors and have installed Windows 7 on it and so far so good! Thanks for the advice! Will post again if anything happens again

 

Hey when you bought the new HDD did your laptop detect it fine? Were you able to run the Hard Drive Test in the BIOS? I am stuck with hard drive not being detected in dv9000. It says No IDE device.