Member Avatar for chawkinson

Hello all,

I have a problem with a laptop that I have not seen before. The original problem was the original heat sink assembly was not working so I ordered a new assembly straight from HP (It's an HP Pavilion dv9728ca running vista home premium). I installed it and the laptop booted into windows. The problem is, when in windows, is that anything I tried clicking on, it would say "windows has stopped responding" and could not do anything. I tested the hard drive with seatools and it passed both the short and long test. I then ran a chkdsk /r from a different computer (I hooked it up as a secondary drive and ran the chkdsk /r from a command prompt.) It said it found/fixed errors so i put the drive back into the laptop and since then, I am not able to boot into windows. It posts and then goes to a black screen with a bunch of weird characters/numbers in the upper left hand corner and I never seen anything like it before. Since it still was not booting into windows properly, I took the drive out of the laptop and hooked it up as a secondary drive again and ran a program called partition table doctor. (Used several times in the past and never had a problem with it). It said that there was a partition error so I let the program fix it. Everything seemed good but still could not boot into windows. I booted to a vista cd and tried running startup repair but it says it cannot find anything wrong. Tried a system restore but there are no restore points available. I also ran memtest and that passed. I cannot boot into safe mode because the weird letter error comes up before I can attempt to boot into safe mode. I'm out of ideas and would greatly appreciate any other ideas to try. Thanks in advance for the help

--Sorry for the long post.

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Dani AI

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A few concise, practical follow-ups for anyone who finds this thread later. The early black screen showing ASCII/hex-like characters (before Windows or Safe Mode starts) is most often a boot-level or partition/metadata problem rather than an application crash. Before a full reinstall, try a focused, data-safe repair sequence and collect diagnostic output so a targeted fix is possible.

Boot from a Vista/Windows recovery disc and open the Command Prompt. Try rebuilding the Windows boot structures in this order:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd

If bootrec /rebuildbcd finds nothing or cannot add installations, recreate the BCD store with bcdboot C:\Windows. To check system files offline:

sfc /scannow /offbootdir=C:\ /offwindir=C:\Windows

Make a complete disk image before attempting repairs. If you need to repair a damaged partition table, prefer a well-known recovery tool such as TestDisk rather than opaque proprietary utilities; TestDisk can list and restore partitions without writing blindly (TestDisk). If you only need files, boot a Linux live USB or WinPE and copy data off the drive first.

Hardware causes should be considered if software repairs and partition fixes fail. As noted, rule out overheating, loose connectors, failing RAM, or a dying drive after software attempts have been exhausted. When asking for more help, include the exact characters shown, the output from the bootrec commands, SMART status, and whether the BIOS sees the drive — that information makes diagnosis far more reliable.

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Member Avatar for Luxifour

Hey! I'm not an expert on these things so this may not help *but* the fact the problem came after the heatsink was replaced makes me think its something to do with the processer, either its getting to hot, or its possibly fried. Either way try to contact HP or take it to a repair company to find outs whats wrong.

Member Avatar for chawkinson

I just reformatted the drive and started over and everything is working now. Thanks for the feedback though!

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