Laptop Fried? What's wrong?

Neil V · #1 06-13-2006, 06:10 PM

I don't know what happened. I had it restart, and then it gave me a disk error. So, thinking it was the hard disk, I unscrewed the panel, took it out, and booted it up. Error went away, but of course I got a blank flickering screen after the HP logo came and went.

So, to test a theory, I took the offices new Portable HD that luckilly arrived today. I installed Windows on it, the Install to the drive went fine, but for whatever reason, it would not let it load Windows itself, and just kept on eternally restarting. Prompting me to go into safe mode, I click on it, and it just restarts..

The Error I got was 'Non System Disk' MBR Error 3.

MBR Error 1, Boot From Floppy.

Anyone know? I've only had the 'top' since October, so it's still pretty new.

Thanks!
Neil

trau · #2 06-13-2006, 07:49 PM

Did you install the new drive into the notebook? If you did and it still keeps rebooting there are two possibilities, bad RAM (or dirty contacts), or bad mainboard. Remove the ram, clean the contacts (use an eraser) and reseat.

Neil V · #3 06-13-2006, 08:15 PM

Nope, the new Drive was a Portable USB HD that I had hooked up. I got the error message before I hooked up the drive, and therefore didn't move the computer an inch. But, when I flipped it over to see if there was a Panel for the LT HD, I did notice ALOT of dust in the fan area..

I'm hoping MRB dosn't stand for Mother Board

dkitchen · #4 06-13-2006, 08:20 PM

Give HP support a call, we've been using HP desktops and notebooks for years and they'll either have you a new notebook or have yours repaired and cleaned back to you in under 3 days.

From my experience they're pretty efficient, infact I had a laptop that got sent back and came back twice with a broken keyboard, and they sent me a whole new notebook twice the spec free of charge and let me keep the old one (which I fixed myself).

Dan

LinuxMaster · #5 06-13-2006, 08:21 PM

MBR stands for master boot record. You need to boot from a windows CD or floppy disk and run "fdisk /mbr". That would be the first step, but the list goes on if that doesn't work.

trau · #6 06-13-2006, 08:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neil V

I'm hoping MRB dosn't stand for Mother Board

MBR== Master Boot Record, its your HDD that seems to be causing the problem

Neil V · #7 06-14-2006, 06:24 AM

MBR== Master Boot Record, its your HDD that seems to be causing the problem
>>

Hmm, that's what I figured. But even when I installed Windows on the new Portable Drive, it still wouldn't start up. And I did it the same way I've done for the past who knows how many years setting up windows

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I'll give the fdisk thing a try later today

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trau · #8 06-14-2006, 07:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neil V

Hmm, that's what I figured. But even when I installed Windows on the new Portable Drive, it still wouldn't start up.

Unless your BIOS supports booting from USB and your boot device order places USB before your internal HDD it will still try to boot from the internal drive, even if you did a fresh install to the external drive, it will still access the core boot files from the internal drive before loading the OS off of the external one.

markjut · #9 06-14-2006, 07:49 AM

Its your hard drive, the reason for the test problem was probably that it doesn't support booting from USB, that was the same on my laptop which was Compaq (basically HP lol)

Neil V · #10 06-14-2006, 01:56 PM

Ok... Here's the update, for those just DYING to know

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I was going to run the FDisk, and reinstalled the hard drive. Just on a lark, I put in the Windows XP disk and booted from it. Booted perfectly. I got it to format the drive before anything else went wrong, and managed to re-install Windows Vista perfectly again.... Go figure.

Someone needs to follow me and do tests on all my errors. I seem to have weird ones

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