HP G6 hard drive replacement from hell

[ClickRight]

I replaced a client's dead hard drive in their HP G6-1b22ca in Jan. I installed a WD black 500GB drive to replace the Seagate that was in there.

Fast forward about 20 days and they say they're getting errors about the hard drive not being detected at POST and blue screens randomly. Said ithappens most often when they move it. They brought it back in, I tested the hard drive again (comprehensive WD test) and it passes. Put it in the computer and it boots up just fine. I used it for days with no problem. Ran memtest, etc. on the computer - all clear. No blue screen dumps to be found either. I updated the BIOS (supposed to correct an error about hanging at startup) rebooted about 10 times, and gave it back to them.

Then, this week, they show up with it again. Now they say it won't start up at all. Run the drive through it's tests again -- all pass. Test the laptop again all good. Go to boot up the laptop and it's stuck in a start-up repair loop with uncorrectable problems! What the tech! I hate these HP laptops. Has anybody run into rejection of 7200RPM hard drives in these HPs? They're supposed to be supported according to the service guide.

 

[thebige]

I am going out on a limb and assuming it is Windows 7 64bit edition? I have encountered many windows 7 64bit updates that corrupt and leave the system in a similar state. Can you confirm?

 

[ClickRight]

I am going out on a limb and assuming it is Windows 7 64bit edition? I have encountered many windows 7 64bit updates that corrupt and leave the system in a similar state. Can you confirm?

Why yes you are quite correct it's 64-Bit Windows 7! However I believe the errors at POST could not be from OS corruption

 

[Scoobaru]

I would replace the ram. The amount of times I've had this on HP and Compaqs and changed the ram and all is well again.

The annoying part is almost all of these passed Mem Tests.

 

[MobileTechie]

Have you personally seen the POST error about it not finding the HDD? It's odd there is no log evidence of blue screens. I'm wondering about the accuracy of the client's error reporting or if they've messed with it at all.

I don't think a laptop is gonna reject a common HDD.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Said it happens most often when they move it.

Possibly a broken power jack? Like Moblie I question the end users reporting on this. BSOD are usually logged. Tell them to take a photo of the blue screen when it happens.

A full diagnostic of the system with HDD memory and CPU needs to be done.

 

[lan101]

Yeah I can't stand hp/compaq laptops either because of these kinds of issues.

It could possibly be an intermittent issue with the board not reading the hard drive as well. I had a customer from 3 or 4 years ago give me their hp that was barely a year old. They always had something wrong with it. It refused to recognize like 4 different new hard drives I tried in it. I believe it was the dv6000 series.

I have another customer in recent memory with a compaq cq61 and just random freezes. Whenever I had the machine here, nothing it was good. The 2nd time I put 1 new 4gb memory chip and threw the old out. It's been good ever since.

 

[HFultzjr]

I replaced a client's dead hard drive in their HP G6-1b22ca in Jan. I installed a WD black 500GB drive to replace the Seagate that was in there.

Fast forward about 20 days and they say they're getting errors about the hard drive not being detected at POST and blue screens randomly. Said ithappens most often when they move it. They brought it back in, I tested the hard drive again (comprehensive WD test) and it passes. Put it in the computer and it boots up just fine. I used it for days with no problem. Ran memtest, etc. on the computer - all clear. No blue screen dumps to be found either. I updated the BIOS (supposed to correct an error about hanging at startup) rebooted about 10 times, and gave it back to them.

Then, this week, they show up with it again. Now they say it won't start up at all. Run the drive through it's tests again -- all pass. Test the laptop again all good. Go to boot up the laptop and it's stuck in a start-up repair loop with uncorrectable problems! What the tech! I hate these HP laptops. Has anybody run into rejection of 7200RPM hard drives in these HPs? They're supposed to be supported according to the service guide.

What about a bad hard drive SATA connection?

Try with a different hard drive and do you get the same results?

 

[FremontPC]

Does it have a diags partition?

Might be worth re-seating the RAM at least, maybe even run on one stick.

 

[ClickRight]

Thanks all for the input! Full suite of diags run on HDD, MB, CPU and RAM, all pass! Client sent a pic of the blue screen, it was a STOP 0x000000F4. Like I said I don't see any dumps on the system from this

This is very strange though--When the laptop came back in February, I updated the bios to version .48. On HP's website the BIOS update was described as this (I had copied and pasted it into my notes)

" Fixes an intermittent issue where repeatedly switching between sleep and hibernate modes and rebooting cause the system to stop responding or to display a black screen error. "

Now it says this:

    "Provides support for the wireless button in systems running Microsoft Windows 8"

and tehre is another NEW bios update just recently released, .49

Version:F.49
Fix/Enhancement:
- Optimized the memory settings to improve the reliability of the memory system

Checking through the system logs on the comptuer, this error came up about 10 times:

"The embedded controller (EC) did not respond within the specified timeout period. This may indicate that there is an error in the EC hardware or firmware or that the BIOS is accessing the EC incorrectly. You should check with your computer manufacturer for an upgraded BIOS. In some situations, this error may cause the computer to function incorrectly."

So, now I'm wondering if a simple BIOS update & reinstall may fix all this?