Intermittent startup problem on laptop

[benpollinger]

Hello all,

My HP nx6125 laptop has an intermittent problem at startup which seems to be getting worse.

I turn it on, the DVD drive spins up, then the HDD, then it powers off and restarts. This cycle takes about 2 secs, and it goes through it about 10 times before it gives up and the fan just stays on. There is no display or beeps, ie. no POST.

Sometimes during the ~10 repetitions it manages to boot correctly and is then fine for hours on end. I have checked for dodgy connections to RAM and HDD and seems fine. No HDD probs detected by Windows or Seagate's hardware level tools.

Laptop is about 2 years old and has some eccentricities. The DVD ejects itself randomly quite often. The battery holds about 2 mins charge but removing it and using mains power only makes no difference to the boot problem.

I don't have a spare 2.5in HDD to try out, but guessing it's that or the DVD drive causing power problems at turn on.

Your thoughts are very welcome.

thanks,
Ben

[mechbas]

It's a safe bet that somewhere on the system board there's an intermittent or cold joint. Unless you're really good at servicing such electronic things you'll likely drive yourself mad trying to find it.
The prob. with the DVD drive is coincidence, bet there short of a general cleaning is the drive's onboard circuitry giving the prob. the usual fix is to replace the drive. Replacement parts are usually not available.

[cguan_77]

hi ben, if you think that your DVD drive is causing trouble you can try to remove it then power on your laptop check if the problem still persist

[phamthy]

Hi Ben!

My HP 6000 series laptop has the same problem.

I assume you already had the start-up problem fixed.
What was the fix?

Thanks,
Thy

[chrishea]

I have / had similar symptoms on an HP DV9000. Did a lot of research and tried lots of suggestions without any success. A couple of things seemed to help to some degree:

* If it goes into the (POST) startup loop, hold down the power button until it shuts off; push the power button again to start it and hold down the Delete key. This seemed to get it past the loop and into a normal startup but it may take a few tries. Once it fails and starts looping, this didn't seem to have any effect so you need to stop it and start it again.

* I found that re-seating the hard drive seemed to help. I suspect that it might have been going into the loop because it was having trouble reading the drive. In my case, the drive wasn't screwed into the machine so it was only attached by the connector. If yours is firmly attached, that may not be a problem unless the drive itself is intermittently bad.

I have mostly been leaving it running. Last night I turned it off and it started OK this AM but I still don't have confidence that it will do it every time.

[PcTestCard.com]

Could be the HDD controller onboard causing the problem.

Unplug the AC adapter and the battery.
Try remove the HDD and the removable devices, then holding down the power button do not let go for 15 seconds to discharge and reset the laptop.

Connect just the AC adapter only.
Use just 1 RAM at a time if there is more than 1 RAM on the laptop.
See if the laptop POST, if so, power off and connect the HDD, and repower on again.

Hope this helps!
Bill

[phamthy]

Thanks Bill and Crishea.

It looks like the HP laptops have haredware problem(s).
See attached from HP forum/website. Or just google "HP laptop startup problem".

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1253725729712+28353475&threadId=1147659