dv9000 hangs at BIOS

My dv9035 is going to be one year old in about two weeks and it just started having problems on booting. I had stripped windows completely off about 6 months ago and put Ubuntu Linux and Kubuntu Linux on it. Since the problems started I used the WinXP MCE restore disks to put it back to factory in anticipation of having to have HP look at it and wanting to avoid the "but this has Linux on it and we don't cover that" issue.

The problem was that on bootup the machine would hang at the HP Logo screen where it has the intel/phoenix bios logos in the lower right corner and the lower left corner had the press ESC to change boot order and F10 to enter setup. It would not boot from CD or enter setup or enter the boot menu. If you pressed F10 it would change the lower left corner to have a small white box saying Please Wait or Entering Setup, I forget which. One time it hung for about 30 sec and then the screen went black except for the fun "Operating System Not Found" text in the top left.

I would have to try booting it 7 or 8 times before it would actually get past that screen and either boot from a Live Linux CD or boot from the hard drive. I told the BIOS, once I got into it after several attempts, tho reset to original settings. I then ran the full disk checks and the primary came back fine after about 45minutes and the secondary disk came back fail after about 30 sec. Once in an operating system the secondary drive could be accessed in windows and mounted/unmounted in Linux. Both are factory original SATA 80GB Seagate Momentus 5400rpm drives.

On a lark I pulled out the drive labeled "2" on the cover, assuming it to be the secondary one though with SATA I wasn't sure if there really was a primary-secondary order anymore. Once it was physically removed from the machine I turned it on and it flew past the screen it used to hang on. I rebooted it about 5 or 6 times in a row and had it boot from HDD and then boot from a CD and then into BIOS and it now seems to have no problems at all with the hanging it recently developed.

I am at a loss to understand why the secondary hard drive would cause it to hang up like that if it has indeed failed or be intermittently working. The OS is on the other remaining drive and is what is running right now as I post this in XP.

Does this make any sense for a cause for the hangups? With a couple of weeks left on my 1 year from HP what approach should I take? Try to get just a replacement drive to avoid losing the laptop for several weeks? Should I ask to send them the whole unit and will they actually see if there are other problems beyond the "semi-working drive"?

I know I'll have to deal with their tech people but I figured if I only ask for a replacement drive to be sent they would do it without making me waste a lot of time on the phone trying things I've already tried. On the other hand I'd hate to ask for just a drive only to find out there was a deeper problem I'm unaware of.

Any comments, suggestions or ideas appreciated.

---I should add I also have a one year "warranty" from Best Buy where I bought it so there exists that avenue as well though I have serious doubts as to what sort of resolution I'd get from them. It is supposed to be the same as HPs and cover anything HP does not. I "think" it supposedly includes up to a replacement if the problem cannot be resolved.

 

I don't know how useful this is but I just noticed a thread on slashdot about Ubuntu and hard drive failure, and remembered your post here so I thought it might be relevant. If nothing else it may be something you want to look into. Anyway check this: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/30/1742258

-Reby

 

Weird... but it does sound like something's gone wrong with the second drive. You could try removing the Windows drive, leaving the Linux drive in place and seeing if the notebook will boot. Odds are it won't. If it does, consistently... then I'm confused. Go to Seagate's website and get their HD diagnostic software, see if that tells you anything.

Hopefully it's just the second HD that's going bad. I'd read the link Reby posted, it's a plausible explanation.

 

Well the second drive is totally empty but it is still formatted for the ext3 file system. I did a few experiments and as long as the second drive is connected the machine will not boot past the BIOS. If I take out the second drive it flies through the boot sequence and works fine (Windows). Making no changes, if I then put the second drive back in it will refuse to boot so I fairly certain that for whatever reason the fault lies with that drive or that SATA interface. I'm betting it is just the drive, I read the article about the HDD settings and Linux/Windows and that is certainly a possibility.

I had just never thought that a laptop with two hard drives would not boot if one drive went south, especially since the faulty drive is empty and is not the OS drive. Perhaps the way HP manufactured the notebook has something to do with it. Maybe if it detects a second drive connected to the SATA interface but that drive is not responding properly it will exhibit the behavior I saw. I've had desktops that had multiple drives and if one went south the rest operated just fine and the machine would boot. So maybe it is something particular to the HP dv9000 series.

I decided to drop it off at Best Buy and let them run their tests on it since it would be faster than going through a bunch of steps I've already tried with HP over the phone. If there is a problem and Best Buy has the HP part the turn around will be better. IF it has to end up going back to HP anyway then at least I don't have to troubleshoot it over the phone with them before they will let me send it back.

If it turns out it was the drive and the drive only then even if they replace it I may go ahead and upgrade both drives to newer, faster, larger drives. I think I can get 7200rpm drives over 100GB in capacity for about $100 each so it may be worthwhile just to prevent the OS drive from dying on me and forcing me to redo the OS yet again. I ran the SMART diagnostics on the remaining OS hard drive and also ran the complete HD Tune checks and the drive came up clean with no bad sectors and no health issues or values even close to the threshold values so it seems ok. If I get new drives I suppose I could always turn it into a small external drive

 

Just in case anyone searches for this topic in the future I'll add an update. Best Buy ran their tests and believe it to be a faulty SATA HDD controller/interface. They are sending it to HP for repair/replacement with an estimated turn around time of 3 weeks. We'll see if I get it or a replacement back by Christmas

So in the mean time I'm having to tote around and use my much older HP ze4900 series notebook with XP. With a 1.4Ghz Celeron and 512Mb of ram it lets me browse the net but that is about it, hehe.

 

Just a note - when the BIOS powers up, it runs the POST (Power On Self Test) which initializes and tests most I/O hardware ie motherboard and peripherals. It could hang or delay until timeout occurs when the drive or controller is faulty. Assuming BestBuy used a replacement drive for their testing, they figured out the POST hangs also with a new drive therefore the conclusion its the on-board controller...in any case, lucky it happened before warranty end as a mobo could be quite a pain to replace...