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Black screen or BSoD when booting.

Discussion in 'Windows XP' started by Nails, 2005/04/16.

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  1. 2005/04/16
    Nails

    Nails Inactive Thread Starter

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    Dear all,

    Helping a friend with an HP Pavilion zt1000 series laptop running XP Home and it has been experiencing the following symptoms:

    When it boots it shows the HP screen then goes to a blank black screen and stays there.

    When it boots it gets all the way to the desktop then while loading system tray icons it BSoDs with a "BAD_POOL_CALLER" generally the amount of time it stays up is about 25~30 seconds sometimes less and getting this far is random.

    When trying to boot into safe mode it freezes on a loading bar before letting me select which operating system to boot from (Only one OS installed). Once today I was able to boot into safe mode and I used system restore to go back to April 1st (my friend claimed he started experiencing this problem two weeks ago so I tried that date). After the restore I experienced more of the blank black screens as mentioned before.

    I'm curious as to how I should proceed at this point. I'm leaning towards a hardware problem because of the randomness. From what I can tell it is not heat related because it booted into safemode and ran through the entire system restore with no problem.

    The major difficulty is the fact that it is a laptop. I've asked my friend if it is still under warranty, he is unsure, but will find out.

    All suggestions and ideas are welcome.

    Regards,

    Nails
     
    Nails,
    #1
  2. 2005/04/16
    PeteC

    PeteC SuperGeek Staff

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    Nails - Welcome to the Board :)

    Sounds like a hardware problem.

    At the HP screen hit F10 to run HP diagnostics (F10 on my HP laptop, but look closely at that screen on that model) and see what it tells you. That's the first step - post back with the results.
     
    PeteC,
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  4. 2005/04/16
    Nails

    Nails Inactive Thread Starter

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    Diagnostics response

    Thanks for the welcome PeteC.

    Ran the e-Diag tools and this is what I got:

    "IDE hard disk drive SMART error: drive (Pri Mst)

    Your IDE hard disk is about to fail. (I thought that was a rather cute line)

    1. Back up your data

    2. Replace the IDE hard disk

    Contact your service provider for further assistance. "

    That is rather self explanatory. Thanks for the tip on HP diagnostics.

    Regards,

    Nails
     
    Nails,
    #3
  5. 2005/04/17
    PeteC

    PeteC SuperGeek Staff

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    Guess that says it all :(

    Good luck!
     
    PeteC,
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  6. 2005/04/17
    Nails

    Nails Inactive Thread Starter

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    Hmmm. One question. If this is just a few bad sectors in the area of the HDD that is being used for the paging file or some other system file what are the chances that a chkdsk/r would fix the problem. I'm considering this as a temporary solution so that I can retrieve the data from the HDD before sending the laptop back to HP to have it replaced.

    Thanks for the help again.

    Regards,

    Nails
     
    Nails,
    #5
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