Hi Everyone-

I was wondering if someone might be able to shed some light on a little problem I been having with an HP Pavilion Laptop. I'm so tired of calling HP phone support and having them run me through the same process over and over again only to have this problem repeat itself.

Sometimes my laptop works well. However, there are many times where upon turning it on it will never boot to any screen at all. The screen will just remain black. Other times, the HP screen will come up but rather than proceed to the windows xp load screen the display will simply flash a blinking white cursor on a black screen. Finally, another thing I've also seen is that same blinking cursor with the message operating system not found sometimes flashing between cursor blinks.

They (HP) have offered me the following solutions (All of which didn't solve the problem):

1.) Hold the power button for approximately 1 minute with nothing connected to laptop. (Not sure exactly what this accomplishes)
2.) Unscrew hard drive from bottom of laptop and then screw back in. I guess they called this proceduring re-seeding the hard drive.
3.) Run a check on the hard drive from the setup menu by hitting f10 I believe before the computer loads. The quick test ran fine. During the comprehensive test, the Laptop simply will shutoff everytime the test gets to 20 % complete.

Can this be a hardware issue even though my laptop loads sucessfully sometimes? I just wish I didn't have this problem.

- Test the system RAM with Memtest86(+)
- Test the hard drive with the proper utility supplied by the drive maker.

In addition to a component failure (RAM or HD itself very likely), it could be a bad contact between the hard drive and the controller. (This is probably what HP wanted to fix with removing the hard drive and putting it back.) When you carry your open laptop holding it only from one lower corner, you put a lot of stress on the chassis and sometimes it is enough to damage connectors on the motherboard. Such a bad connection would explain the intermittency of the issue.

skelly022782, if you want more information, please tell exact laptop model.

On top of the monitor it sayd DV2000 but I think the exact model number is the HP Pavilion dv2116wm.

test RAM, test HDD. if they work fine, then laptop needs the reballing of southbridge chip.

I am pretty sure u need a new hard drive. I have ran thru similar situation ans it is always the hard drive going bad. I would suggest to back up any data on the hard drive that u might need and try doing a low level format on it (filling it all with zeroes) that many times fixes small hard drive problems.