Freezing at HP load up screen

[Gallin Bejal]

HP Pavilion Desktop p7-1423w with windows 8 is freezing intermittently on HP load screen. I have gone down a few trails to try and solve the problem. First I checked into the SD Card problem HP had been having. I ruled that out. There is one stick of RAM which I reseated in the other slot. It continued to start intermittently. I unplugged USB mouse and Keyboard. This seemed to have an effect as it would often boot, but when immediately repeated it wouldn't boot. I unplugged the Hard Drive started the machine, turned off, replugged in the hard drive, problem persisted. You can tell immediately if the machine will boot properly by the sound (or lack thereof) of the hard drive. I am convinced that when it fails to boot is completely random and happenstance upon some hardware issue.
I'm fairly certain this is a hardware issue and most likely the hard drive but wanted to get other thoughts.

 

[C12Friedman]

I'll suggest running two programs; 1) Seatools for DOS here http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/item/seatools-dos-master/ which will check the health of your hard drive and 2) MemTest86 here http://www.memtest86.com/download.htm which will check your ram's health

 

[Darthjonathan12]

My boss always told me HP stands for Has Problems. Do you have a way of connecting your HDD to a working computer to run any number of disk repair tools?

 

[Gallin Bejal]

I was unable to boot from the disk. The RAM checks out on another machine.

 

[Gallin Bejal]

My boss always told me HP stands for Has Problems. Do you have a way of connecting your HDD to a working computer to run any number of disk repair tools?

For sure, I am working on for a friend. And I think they bought it at WALMART! Anyway, I was able to run check disk on another machine. No bad sectors. Ram checks out in other machine as well.

 

[Darthjonathan12]

My boss always told me HP stands for Has Problems. Do you have a way of connecting your HDD to a working computer to run any number of disk repair tools?

For sure, I am working on for a friend. And I think they bought it at WALMART! Anyway, I was able to run check disk on another machine. No bad sectors. Ram checks out in other machine as well.

Run a MEM test 86+ if thats not the problem check to see if the motherboard has any known issues of capacitors blowing. If both check out then I would recommend trying a different OS like windows 7 and see if that works.

 

[C12Friedman]

If you could not boot with the Seatools for DOS disk, there is a major hardware issue going on that is not simply the hard drive. Since the Seatools for DOS disk has an OS on it, it doesn't need (or use) the hard drive to boot (You did use Seatools for DOS and not the Windows version I hope). I'd say to pull the mobo and check capacitors, you may be lucky and find that it is a replaceable capacitor (or two or...) that is the issue. I'll also recommend checking any IC's on the board for burns (it's usually quite obvious when they burn) although it is less common to see now, some IC's are replaceable without reballing.