I have an HP dv9000 laptop (about a year old) which won't boot up. I hit the power button and you hear it start, but before anything even shows up on the screen it just restarts, it keeps doing this until I hold the power button down to hard shut down. Can anybody help?

Sounds like your hard drive may have failed. You are in what's called a cyclical reboot and I bet there is a BSOD (blue screen of death) hiding in there somewhere. Trying booting into safe mode (Press F8 shortly after powering on) If you have an option to "Disable Restart on Failure" choose that option and hit Return. This will cause it to stop at the BSOD and you can make note of the error message. You may also try reseating the hard drive as well. Most times I have seen this in laptops is for an "unmountable boot volume" or corrupted OS.

Let me know what you find.

I tried starting in safe mode, but it does not stay on long enough for pushing F8 to work before reboot. I will try reseating the hard drive and see if that helps. If this does not work, will data on the hard drive be lost?

Not necessarily. If the drive gets power and the heads aren't crashed (and you would probably hear loud clicking if this were the case or nothing at all) you can pull the drive and probably read it just by connecting it via a special cable to another computer. If the drive is okay, you wouold probably be able to restore your system using recovery disks as well.

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic55208.html

I have tried the above, not working. Does this mean the hard drive is toast. If so, what do I do?

The drive is most likely bad and as above replied, that doesn't necessarily mean data is lost. You need to get to a good pc. Connect the bad drive as a slave on the good pc. If you don't know how to do that, there are several websites that explain how. Not too hard. Then you should be able to see the drive. Open it up and if you have any saved files, you can copy them to the good pc. Other than that, you probably need to purchase a new hard drive and re-load windows.

Good Luck

It's not the harddrive. If it were, the BIOS would start and you get display before it stops.

See if you can get into BIOS (unilkely but try and see if you can.) If not, then you have a MoBo issue of some kind. Backup your harddrive using another PC and then take the laptop into a servicing depot.

Best,
-- Andy

Two questions then,
A. Is it possible it is just the BIOS battery, or would the whole motherboard need to be changed,
B. How would I backup the data using another PC? can you provide instructions or a link to show me how?

A) unilkely because if the BIOS cannot read the saved settings in CMOS, it uses preset defaults in the BOIS program. Likely, your MoBo will need replacing. It could be a grounding issue but likely, the MoBo is toast.

B) You remove the hard drive and connect it via PCI or USB to another computer. The computer will detect it as a slave drive and you can see the contents of it. Be sure to set the jumper on the old drive as "slave" or "cable select". Copy you personal files to the new computer's master drive. All PCs have an extra harddrive PCI connector or you can buy a PCI-to-USB connector and connect to the USB port.

Best,
-- Andy

I pulled the hard drive out of the laptop, and opened up my PC, but see no place to connect it. Where to I buy a PCI-USB connector?

My apologies. When I wrote my response I forgot to pick up on the fact that the first hard drive is from a laptop while you are trying to back it up onto a desktop. The connectors are different between laptops and desktops when it comes to hard drives. Both as PCI but the size of the connector head is different (3.5" for desktop, 2.5" for laptops)

You need to get a PCI to USB connector. I have one called EZ-Connect made by Kingwin http://www.kingwin.com Just buy one at the local computer store. The connector will fit both 3.5" and 2.5" PCI sizes.

Best,
-- Andy

No problem,
I will pick up a cable. One last question, any recomendation on a good place to go for a motherboard?

If it's a laptop, then I would suggest shipping it back to the manufacturer. Is it still under warranty?

-- Andy

No it is not under warranty.
One more question. I have pulled the SATA drive from the laptop and connected it to a bytecc usb 2 drive mate adapter and my computer was able to detect the drive the first time I connected, but after that it does not detect it. Any suggestions?

My reaction would be that your copy of Windows does not have a USB device driver for that laptop hard drive. Try and see if you can connect the laptop hard drive to the slave SATA connector on the desktop MoBo

Best,
-- Andy

Managed to get the computer to read the drive. Pulled all the data. Thanks for all your help!

I do accecpt payment in beers!

Best,
-- Andy

The six pack is in the mail

same chipset, same problems... nvidia 6150go\6100go.. i can give you an advice: disassembly your laptop, disconnect the heatsink from motherboard. remove thermointerface from the northbridge(6150go or 6100go). the next thing you should to find is soldering station with "blowing foehn" (you'll fit the cheapest one). set the temperature to 150-200 degrees and begin to blow onto the crystall of the northbridge chip. the time to blow is 15-20 seconds. after that, disconnect the CMOS battery, connect the power-on board,lid-sensor,memory modules and turn on the laptop. the laptop will succesfully turns on and will show you a picture with 90% probability. and what's the point? with this action, we have discovered the failure of the northbridge chip