Absolutely unusable Pavilion DV6

[AndrN]

Hello, good people ! I have come to my wit's end, hope you can give me a helping hand. I own an old HP Pavilion dv6-3157eg Entertainment Notebook laptop, it's from 2010, I think. It was barely open and operated, then it got seized in 2011 and remained in unknown-conditions storage until 2015. When it got back to my possession, it wouldn't start: showed a black screen with "No Boot, insert boot disk press any key". Took it to service and they said the laptop didn't have an OS. I know for sure that it DID have an original, with licence Windows prior to being seized. Since I needed to use this laptop, I tried a recovery via the 5 Recovery DVDs. It got stuck with a screen that said "Insert dvd 3 and continue..."  I then performed all the quick and extensive tests, with no HDD or memory problems found. I did a HDD reseating as shown in the support video. Nothing helped booting. I created a USB Windows recovery and changed the boot order in BIOS. Nothing worked. I tried a clean Windows re-install via USB disk. Upon start, it shows Loading windows files. then the Windows logo, then the horrible Blue Screen of Death shows up, as in the attached picture. No memory dump ever showed up on that screen. I am basically stuck and nobody seems to know the problem. Basically, a useless, never-used HP. It's hard not to mention that I NEVER had any such issues with a Sony or ANY other manufacturer, for that matter.... Please, can anyone tell me if I should have any hope with this ? TIA ! 

Multiple errors

[WAWood]

@AndrN 

I wish I had better news for you -- but we are NOT HP Tech Support and we have no way of examining or diagnosing your PC for you.

The F4 error is most typically associated with a failing drive, and since you said this had been "siezed" there's no telling what the other folks did to it after they got it -- they could have dropped it or damaged it in some other way.

I know you said you ran diagnostics, so if the hard drive tested out as OK, they could have caused some motherboard or disk controller damage -- no real way to tell at this point.

You could try a new drive, but that would only tell you if the drive was bad and would not address the other problems.

Since this is LONG out of warranty, you could pay to have it checked, but that could easily cost hundreds of dollars -- and would probably not be worth it with a laptop this old.

[AndrN]

WAWood , thank you for replying, God bless you ! I believe you are right in everything you've said. Still, I would give it a go and try replacing the HDD directly, maybe I could still use the machine after that (I can't afford a brand new one and even if old, it would still be fine for my work). Do you mind telling me what would be the maximum capacity of a hard drive that this particular model could take ? To be honest, I know little about all of its specs, I tried searching online. 

Offtopic: can I ask if you're just a HP enthusiast (thus prefer this brand to others) or is it that you just came to know their products very well ? Just a curiosity... 🙂

Have a wonderful day/evening ! ^_^ 

[WAWood]

@AndrN 

I have an old DV6 that I still use every day -- but I have replaced the HDD with an SSD and that greatly increased the performance of the PC.  Since it came with a 500GB HDD, I replaced that with a 500GB SSD. I've seen them advertised for under $50 nowadays.

The much tougher problem is that HP no longer provides Win7 recovery media and this other site doesn't carry much of it anymore, either:   http://www.computersurgeons.com/

So, it can be very hard finding a copy of Win7 to reinstall the PC.