[solved] Vista Sleep Causes Major Problems

[Guest]

The PC often crashes when "woken up". Most notably, I am now stuck at the BIOS startup screen and can go no further.

THE LONG STORY:
I have an HP m9350f PC running Windows Vista. Dunno if posting links is kosher, but the specs can be found on the first search result on Google for {m9350f fry's}

I often have my wife put my computer into sleep mode during the day so that whatever various programs I have running don't interfere with her latency. Lately (and this has been happening more and more often), when the computer is woken up, it will crash in some way.

It started with the occasional black screen, just frozen but without activity. Then it progressed to a frozen login screen. Most recently, it crashed while logging in and wouldn't reboot without a system recovery.

Finally, this morning, it crashed when woken up. I believe it may have been put to sleep in the middle of converting a .avi file to .m4v using AVS Converter. I had a login screen, and I could type my password, but the enter key wouldn't work. I tried deleting the password and starting over, but it didn't help. I tried backing out to the login screen, and it froze there completely, asking me to choose a user (there are two user accounts, although the other is almost completely untouched.) I gave up, being in a hurry to get to work, and held the power button down until it powered down. I then left for work.

Dunno if this makes a difference, but there were storms later that day and so I had the computer unplugged for the majority of the day.

I came home, turned it on, and it now hangs at the BIOS startup screen. If I let it continue from there (ever so slowly), I get a black screen with a single blinking cursor and absolutely no activity. If I'm fast, I can enter BIOS, although once finished there, it goes immediately to the blinking cursor and continues doing nothing. Going to System Recovery goes straight to the blinking cursor.

I can't access any of the options available at the BIOS startup screen, like Diagnostic or Boot Menu.

Not sure where to go from here. I picked this PC up brand new but the disks that came with it got thrown away not five days ago, after over two years. What timing.

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Any thoughts? Recommendations? Requests for further information? If I missed any threads covering a similar issue, I apologize.

 

[Guest]

Solved!

I finally managed to get the Diagnostic to run. It gave me a BIOHD-2 error, which led me to discover that the hard drive (part of the Seagate 7200.11 line) is known to have problems and to have futzed up a bunch of HP models. Evidently their product replacement program is only valid through their one-year warranty ( >:-| ) but I still have a couple months left with the extended warranty at Fry's.

Now I just have to be walked through the process of slaving the busted HD to the new HD in order to hopefully save my data. But, that's a topic for another post and another day. Thanks anyways, folks.

And take a lesson: get your firmware updates for Seagate 7200.11 hard drives with model number ST3750630AS.

 

[Jonmor68]

Another lesson here is, NEVER ever throw away the disks that come with the pc unless you throw the pc with them. Mind you, you would be lucky to get any disks these days.