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HP Recommended
Pavilion a6400f
Microsoft Windows Vista

Dear forum... I have a fairly old a6400f desktop that's been pretty reliable over the years. Last night after using, I put it in "sleep" mode as I normally do. Today I awoke to a blue "hp invent" screen prompting me to hit ESC, or F9, F10, F11... for setup/bios/recovery, etc. None of the keys however provided any response.

   I recalled that a couple of years ago I used to get some warning once in a while on reboot about the fan (F12 to bypass it, or something like that), so I shut down and did a thorough cleaning in and around the fan (it had accumulated quite a lot of dust). I tried to boot back up again but it made no difference. I shut down again and then tried disconnecting the internal hard drive (Seagate Barracuda 500g). This time when I tried to reboot, it went a little further - to a black screen saying "Reboot and select proper boot device". Would anyone have any advice please? Does this mean my hard drive is dead? (please god, no).

 

Thanks!

     Shawn

 

2 REPLIES 2
HP Recommended

Hi Shawn,

 

I would say a bad HDD is very probable. Your PC would not complete a successful POST until you disconnected the HDD.

 

Can't find your PC using HP site search. But you can download HP Diagnostics for your PC at this HP site (Link). a6400f sounds like a Legacy PC. You may need HP Vision Diagnostics which can be used on either USB or CD media.

 

You are running windows Vista. No longer supported.  This PC is circa 2008, found a link using Internet search (Link).

 

You may need to buy a new PC if you don't have HP recovery media for this product and the HDD or a different component has failed. Sorry, you may be out of time.

 

Regards

HP Recommended

Thank you Sir for the reply and the suggestions. Unfortunately, I was unable to successfully download the Vision Diagnostics - the download kept timing out by itself after about 180 megs (519 meg size file). I tried many times. 

    I then tried to download the HP Diagnostics UEFI. I was successful in downloading it, but I could not install it to my USB drive as it appears it's a 64 bit application and I am running 32 bit Windows XP on this computer.

 

Maybe there is an alternate download site for the Vision Diagnostics that I might have more luck with?

 

Thanks!

    Shawn

 

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