Random shut downs when trying to format and restore hard drive. [ Edited ]

[liquid-ice]

Hey guys. Alright so this is a kind of long story so please bear with me.

My laptop (actually my dad's) has been having a problem for a long time where it randomly shuts off. Just out of the blue, like you pulled the plug. It started doing it sometime last year and at that time we formatted and restored the hard drive with the 3 recovery disks. It was even doing it during the formatting process so it took many tries before it was able to get through all 3 recovery disks. But after it did, it was fine.

Now about February this year it started up again. But my dad is in a different state now and I wasn't entirely sure how to format and restore so I just put up with the problem until recently, when it shut off and I turned it back on, it failed to start up all the way. It would get to the welcome screen and then give me a blue screen of death and restart. Over and over. I started up in safe mode and tried start from a restore point and the computer shut down in the middle of it. At that point when I tried to start up it said a critical file was missing (something like "system32/hal.dll") So now I'm at the point where I'm doing a format and restore with the 3 recovery disks again and it keeps turning off like before. I believe the most it's gotten to is like 12%. I'm not sure if it'll go the rest of the way but I'm hoping so.

Anyway my question is, what do you think would be the cause of these random shut downs, even in the middle of formatting? At first I thought it might be overheating, especially because it seemed more prone to shutting down if I was watching a video or playing a game, but because the problem resolved itself after formatting the first time, I don't think that's it. I'm thinking it's the hard drive, but I can't really run a hard drive diagnostic test because it even shuts down during that.

I hope I was detailed enough and feel free to move this to another section if you think it would help.

Oh yeah, it's a DV6000 and my OS is Windows XP.

[amaresh]

This is nothing but motherboard problem.  If you have nvidia graphics card, see the following web links.

Affected models:

http://www.nvidiasettlement.com/affectedmodels.html

FAQ

http://www.nvidiasettlement.com/faq.html

[liquid-ice]

Thanks for the answer. Are you pretty sure about this? So there's no way you think it could maybe be a hard drive problem? That's what I was hoping for because there was a $15 hard drive on ebay lol.

I looked at that site you gave me and I'm not eligible to file a claim because my product number isn't on that list. Plus I didn't even see random shut downs as a symptom.

[alt_164]

Yep. its the motherboard. If you want to be sure, you can run hdd test over and over until it lets you finish or give a failure message. But a faulty hdd will not cause the computer to shutdown even on bios.

[CherylG]

What is your full model number and P/N from the Service Tag on bottom of laptop? Locating Model Number

[Fabby]

Thank You Kudos for your excellant posts.   This one was especially great for me as I qualify for a replacement notebook and am happier I know what is wrong with my laptop.

Cheers,

Fabby

[Knute]

Is it hot when this happens?  Look at this link:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01657439&tmp_track_link=ot_faqs/top_issues/en_u...