Hp Touchsmart All In One 9300 Will Not Boot Up

There have been numerous times I tried something that absolutely should not help and it did. I switched to a different laptop drive and now I have access to bios and can make changes. It is still quirky. Fn function keys don't work to enter bios if there is a DVD in the drive. I have to start it up, set it too boot up to the DVD drive with the boot menu. Then insert the DVD and hit enter to boot to the DVD. I ran the repair disk made for the 9300 and everything 9300 related passes every test.
It will not do a Windows repair. At one point it asked me which W8.1 installation I wanted to repair and there were three to choose from. Just to see if I could get it fully functional, I started a new Windows installation. That is not going well. It say "Getting Ready" with the Windows Logo and the spinning dots for about 20 minutes now. I had to change bios to use Legacy Boot and chose the hard drive to get that going.
If I can get it back fully functional, I will start over with a different hard drive. I may have to give up on the existing hard drive unless I zero it out and format it.
Bios is set to show Post Messages have a 20 second delay.
I hate getting defeated by a computer. lol I've only had a few defeat me and not work. A program called Hard Drive Regenerator fixed very many of them.
http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html

I will let you know if I get it back as good as it was. Thank you very, very much for hanging in there and trying to help me. It is greatly appreciated.
I think I have it where I can win the battle with it...lol

On an off topic note, I have a new record for spyware and tracking cookies found on a PC. I checked a friends laptop with SuperAntiSpyware and it
found 8,437. Before that 800 was the most I've ever seen.

 

Yes, you should now be able to (eventually) re-install Windows .You have done well-It seems that the motherboard is still functional- just have to fart about with the buttons-good.
Thee hard drive (s) could both be faulty, but with another computer, you could run Partition Wizard, and do a hard drive check for faulty sectors,which will show up in Partition Wizards little chart as red squares.
I have found that hard drives with more than 2 bad sectors in the first 500mb of the hard drive really make it difficult to install on it.
If you check it that way, you could format the hard drive, in that computer and create one partition, of around 1gb , then the second as whole of system, mark the damaged first 1gb partition as hidden, then the second partiton, format as NFTS, and set it active. This way I have managed to use damaged hard drives for some time.
Good luck-do come back and let us know how you manage from here on.

 

So far so good.
Just to let you know that I'm posting this from the 9300 with Windows 10. So far so good. Device Manager shows no errors I haven't downloaded any Windows updates yet..
The bios is UEFI The hard drive was partitioned and set up by Windows 10 so things should be OK, I think. I did a clean install from a DVD without the key to get it installed. I will try the original Microsoft Key to activate it.

 

Well done-
I suppose it still boots up slowly, as we made it to--Once fully running as you want it, it , if you want to speedup Windows start up, it would speed it up, if you set it to default in bios. However, I would suggest not until you are happy with it.
Note, if you wish to have a recovery partition, then I would suggest Aomie to create it, but this is just a fail safe for you.
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/aomei_backupper_standard.html
Incidently, did you manage to use one of your old hard drives ? and did you have to do the hidden partition,as I indicated before,if the harddrive was giving problems- It helps to see exactly how the final setup was achieved, as you were having problems getting it to move beyond a point in setup,previously.

 

I used the hard drive that would not boot up after the crash with Win8.1. When the PC worked with the original Hard Drive and Win7, I knew the problem had to be corrupt files on the hard drive. I ran that hard drive regenerator program on it and it did not find one bad sector. Then I wiped the whole drive writing Zeros to it. I then put it in the 9300 and installed Windows 10 from am installation DVD I had here with a friends PC. I put in the Win7 CD Key from the sticker on the 9300. It installed just fine and all updates downloaded with no problems. It shows that Windows 10 is activated.

I have been using Easeus Todo Back up and Clone 6.0 for a while now and have been happy with how it works. I probably need a newer version with Win10 because much of the older file work programs don't want to work with the GPT and UEFI stuff Win10 prefers.

 

Great-A nice success story- Hp should hold their heads in shame, saying motherboard needs replacing-Have you tried compatibility mode on those older programs ?

 

I was sure glad about what it cost to fix. We didn't get it till after the new hard drive was put in it and Win 8.1 was installed. So there were no programs that were used by us in Win7 and no need for trying the compatibility mode. The Win 7 was a fresh reset,also, so it was not used by anyone before it was switched to Win 8.1. I just about gave up on it but I just couldn't believe it could be something that fatal. Then when I saw that laptop drive laying there, I thought that it would be light enough to stay on the terminals if I plugged it in. That was when the bios showed signs of life. I've always been one to try things not in the books when I was doing machine design so that carried over to computers.

 

This thread has gotten long, so...

Have you recovered your data?

If you have, I would just go Guttmann style scorched earth on the drive with DBAN, and start over...

 

Data was recovered as much as possible earlier, before any tinkering, (post #10)
Unfortunately,we had to try a fair bt of tinkering to get it working, and den942 kept listening, and trying himself, so worth the length of post on this one.

 

I could access the data but not get it to boot up. I think I got almost everything saved. I haven't had time to look at the drive where I saved them.