Pavillion dv9000 freezing problem

Hi folks, I am having an issue with my HP pavillion dv9000. The computer has both Vista and XP professional on it. A few days ago, the computer started freezing after only a few minutes of use. It will not respond to ctr-alt-del and the only thing I can seem to do is do a hard shut down. It does this in both vista and XP professional, whether I'm on the Internet or just watching a DVD. It will also shut down at random times and get stuck on a grey screen. The computer is no longer under warranty and I'm not sure what to do at this point. Any advice?
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If you can install, and run this program it will give us a good idea as to the condition of the hard drive:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Hard_Disk_Sentinel_d7520.html


If not, the Ultimate Boot CD has diagnostics which you can run from a CD-ROM at startup. You just need to know your drive's manufacturer.

Another possibility is that the display adapter (graphics card) is running it's last leg.

 

Thanks, I'll try to run the sentinel and report back.

 

I have not run sentinel yet but I ran the error checking tool "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors." The scan finished and showed no problems. Does that actually tell us anything?

 

Not entirely.

What I recommend is burning an Ultimate Boot CD, and then run RAM diagnostics and hard drive diagnostics.

Usually with this kind of freezing the drive tends to be on it's last gasps, BUT faulty RAM can write bad data to the drive. Also, just because the drive has no bad sectors doesn't mean that the motor in the hard drive isn't ready to "give up the ghost".

Can you clone the drive to a known good one as a backup image?

 

I do not know how to clone a drive to a known good one. Since this computer has a drive for XP and a separate drive for Vista, should I buy an external drive to transfer them both to?

 

To play it safe, a backup image of your drive is always a good thing. That way you can only lose what you added since the last backup.

What you can do is get an external drive, and partition it into two parts. Then you can use one partition for XP, and the other for Vista. You just need to make sure each partition is sized to accomodate the amount of drive space required.

Free software such as Easeus can do the job, and it's quite simple to use.

 

Awesome, thanks!