Alright, hopefully some answers can be found here. I've posted questions here before and everyone here has always helped.

My wife has a HP DV2125nr. She bought it prior to Vista being released, but was able to get an upgrade disk for free from HP due to the purchase date. So, it's originally an XP install with a Vista upgrade. For the past couple of months (at least) we've been attempting to run a defrag and it states that we need to run a test on the disk first, so we set it to test at the next reboot. When CHKDSK comes up it gets to 3% and stops....no just slows down, but stops. I'm a techie myself, having built systems from scratch and beta tested Vista (and the upcoming SP1), and this one just has me stumped. I've run other diag programs within Windows on the drive and it tests fine, but CHKDSK failing is usually a sign of an issue. Geek Squad had it for a week and found nothing (no surprise), and HP states it out of warranty and won't do a thing. Any ideas?

Have you tried the diagnostic tools provided by the manufacturer?

I haven't run the diag tools from the manufacturer, as the hard drive is a Fujitsu, and they state that their diag tools require some extra atapi32 driver in order to run. I have run a test by Western Digital and both the basic and the extended test report fine.

hum; check for VISTA specific driver update.

Yes, Vista has some 60 updates available at this time. Make sure you download and install them. They really make Vista more "friendly"...

Vista is completely up to date, that's something I check on almost every other day.

Hey, I'm getting the exzact same problem for the last few days, same notebook
If I skip the chkdsk and boot to WIN vista, the registry goes to default (same thing as when I bought it), but all my files are still there. Help appreciated. I'm running a hdd scan right now from the PhoenixBios. So far I've failed all the tests. much luck to you my friend in war.

to my knowledge, DRIVERS to not automatically get updated like everything else does
for the AutoUpdate option

try it; it's just a few minutes and may save hours of anguish

Yes these are called "optional" updates. Optional or not, most of these should be installed