First of all, I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right place, so if I'm not, let me know.
My basic problem is that when I start up my desktop, it hangs at the HP blue screen and ignores any keyboard input. I have an HP Pavilion desktop that is about a year or two old and the only hardware change I've made is installing a new video card, but that was a couple of months ago. I believe my problem is my hard drive, but I'm really not sure.
It all started a couple of days ago when my desktop would randomly bluescreen while I wasn't doing anything in particular, and occasionally when I would restart my computer, I would get messages such as "Hard drive failure imminent" and "Failure to boot from hard drive" or something like that. After another restart, though, it would start working again.
Today, I tried to start up my computer again but this time it refused to go past the initial HP startup screen. It's a blue screen that comes up immediately when the computer is turned on. All of the lights on my usb devices (Keyboard, headphones, mouse, etc.) come on and the monitor works fine. All of the lights on the desktop and my graphics card come up fine, and all of the fans seem to be working normally. The computer just doesn't load windows and it won't let me access anything, even though there are onscreen instructions such as "Esc: Boot Menu."
I figured that my hard drive had finally died on me, but I decided to try a few things. First, I took out all of the ram sticks and tried them one by one. After a while, the computer actually started up normally when one of the sticks was removed, but it ended up bluescreening again after a little while. After a little while, I tried replacing all of the RAM sticks again, and the computer started up normally again, and crashed again soon after, so now I don't think the RAM had anything to do with it.
Just for the sake of it, I unplugged and replugged everything inside my computer, took out that one suspicious ram stick, and tried getting rid of some of the dust. Now every once in a while, but very rarely, it will actually start up normally (although it does ask to check my drive for consistency) and seems to work for a while. Sometimes it blue screens, and sometimes strange things happen like the task bar and desktop icons being unresponsive, but whenever I start up the computer again it usually goes back to hanging at the blue startup screen.
My basic problem is that when I start up my desktop, it hangs at the HP blue screen and ignores any keyboard input. I have an HP Pavilion desktop that is about a year or two old and the only hardware change I've made is installing a new video card, but that was a couple of months ago. I believe my problem is my hard drive, but I'm really not sure.
It all started a couple of days ago when my desktop would randomly bluescreen while I wasn't doing anything in particular, and occasionally when I would restart my computer, I would get messages such as "Hard drive failure imminent" and "Failure to boot from hard drive" or something like that. After another restart, though, it would start working again.
Today, I tried to start up my computer again but this time it refused to go past the initial HP startup screen. It's a blue screen that comes up immediately when the computer is turned on. All of the lights on my usb devices (Keyboard, headphones, mouse, etc.) come on and the monitor works fine. All of the lights on the desktop and my graphics card come up fine, and all of the fans seem to be working normally. The computer just doesn't load windows and it won't let me access anything, even though there are onscreen instructions such as "Esc: Boot Menu."
I figured that my hard drive had finally died on me, but I decided to try a few things. First, I took out all of the ram sticks and tried them one by one. After a while, the computer actually started up normally when one of the sticks was removed, but it ended up bluescreening again after a little while. After a little while, I tried replacing all of the RAM sticks again, and the computer started up normally again, and crashed again soon after, so now I don't think the RAM had anything to do with it.
Just for the sake of it, I unplugged and replugged everything inside my computer, took out that one suspicious ram stick, and tried getting rid of some of the dust. Now every once in a while, but very rarely, it will actually start up normally (although it does ask to check my drive for consistency) and seems to work for a while. Sometimes it blue screens, and sometimes strange things happen like the task bar and desktop icons being unresponsive, but whenever I start up the computer again it usually goes back to hanging at the blue startup screen.