freezing during boot up

Hey guys and girls, not sure if this is the right place to ask for help but only place I could see to post. I have a v2000z (1.6GHz AMD Turion, 768MB DDR333MHZ, 40 GB HD). It was working fine up to a few days ago. I was playing Civ 4 and then shut it down. I needed to get back into my laptop so I booted up about 10 mins after I shut down and it got to the windows XP loading screen and then just went blank after running the loading screen for a bit (still ON though). Now I looked for other people with this problem and didn't see anything so if I missed a thread like that please just direct me to that thread. Now I tried to boot up again and was bought to the screen with a couple of options for booting up since it recognized it didn't get to boot up successfully. I tried the just boot normally option, boot from last good know configurations and all the safe modes options and still always freezing. I tried booting with the XP CD but that freezes at the blue screen when it loads all the drivers and software and stops at the part saying "Setup now starting Windows". Any ideas how I can fix this problem. I really don't want to format unless I need to cause there are some files I have been working on that I need and would be a ***** to have to work on again if I lose them. Please and thank you for any help.

 

Hmm... first thing I'd try is to burn a MemTest86+ CD on another machine and see if your v2000z will boot and run it. If it will run for at least half an hour without reporting errors then... I'll be surprised. Most likely it'll error, in which case unplug, remove the battery, and remove the second SODIMM you added. Plug back in and try MemTest86+ again.

 

Well Im running memtest now and it just hit the 30 minutes with 1 pass and 0 errors and thats with the two sticks

 

Hmm... so much for that idea. That leaves the HD as a plausible hardware problem. You can try finding the HD manufacturer's free diagnostics and burn and boot those. For a more expensive (and thorough) test, you could buy a copy of Spinrite. Or... it's not the HD and I'm missing something.

Actually, I have seen memory pass MemTest86+ but still fail in use. What brand/speed/etc was the memory that you added? You could try removing it and seeing if the problem clears up. That's probably more likely than a HD problem.

Worst case, HP is going to have to deal with it, but let's not go there just yet.

 

well I continued to run memtest and continued to pass 3 more times, I don't think the ram is the problem. The ram is Patriot Memory 512mb 333mhz and Hynix 256mb 333mhz (from HP). I burnt a Xp boot disk CD and got into msdos and I couldn't find the HD which makes me think the HD is the problem now. I went into the bios and found it on the boot list (just like the make and model, since thats all the information I could get from the bios which is ****). When I boot into msdos with the cd the A: is the dvd-rom and B: is some drive, it fails to read it and asks me Abort, Retry or Fail. Thanks for your help so far.

{UPDATE}I tried the Fujitsu HD Diagnostic and HD checks out.

 

Seriously, try without the Patriot SODIMM installed, if just to be thorough. At the very least you'll have to remove it before sending it to HP or they'll blame it for your problems so it's best to do your own test without it first. The simple fact that the CPU and HD are under greater load (and drawing more power) when you're trying to boot/run Windows may be enough to cause the RAM to fail while it passes under MemTest.

AMD64 chips are exceptionally picky about RAM. Many SODIMM makers are annoyingly lax about testing against AMD's high-performance integrated memory controller. Intel's higher latency (slower) external controllers don't give RAM as much of a workout. That's why I have people test the heck out of their RAM configuration when weird problems like this occur.

 

What do you mean you went to MSDos with the XP boot disk? Generally, MSDos will not see anything which is not FAT16 and FAT32....
How did you boot with the XP disk (you said in the first post that it freezes too)?

 

Microsoft has an equivalent to MemTest86+ here. It might be worth getting a second opinion from it.