hp pavillion dv4000 not booting

[james.f.william]

Hi,

I'm trying to fix my housemate's laptop, it's a HP Pavillion dv4000.

I turn it on, the screen with <f2> enter setup <f10> change boot order
It then goes to the windows xp loading screen with the blue scrolling bar for an abnormally long time... maybe 2 minutes. Then the blue bar freezes, a blue screen flashes past too quick to read and it goes back to the "HP invent" startup screen with the change boot order, enter setup and boot from LAN options like at the beginning. After leaving it running for a bit it comes up with a black screen with the following written on it:

For Realtek RTL8139(x)/8130/810X PCI Fast Ethernet Controller v2.13 (020326)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.

[mechbas]

You didn't mention which OS ver you're using, but the only OS ver's that did have a blue scroll across the bottom was W9x. XP doesn't.
The first line is simply telling you the VGA adapter info, and, if you are able to read the screen the adapter is basically O.K.
The second line is the most telling. The system board is unable to establish communication with the hard drive. While this COULD be evidence of a failing/failed drive, it could also simply mean a bad connection with the drive, defective ribbon (Y) cable, and/or a bad power cable, the latter of which is the most likely. In fact it indicated "check cable", good advice.
The last line is the machines way of telling you that there is no info to base any kind of boot on.

[cguan_77]

hi james, it could be a faulty network controller on your mobo, try to disable the network booting on your CMOS setup..