I am working on a HP laptop specifically a Pavillion DV6642ca. This is a friends machine and she brought it to me and said it quit. Went to start it and nothing. So I went to the bios ran the HD test, failed bought exact replacement drive, refurbished. HD is fine according to same test. will not load windows 7 or the HP recovery disks (Vista). Set Bios to boot from CD, get "press any key to boot from CD" select. computer runs through cd like it was going to load but never writes to the HD (disk activity light never flickers). Screen says loading windows, four color window shows up and then cd stops computer powers down and reboots. Exact same symptoms and results, multiple times. Load again use F8 select safe mode with prompt. Computer picks up operating system, writes to disk (indicator light flashes, lots) get to select language screen, at next screen select fix my Hard drive errors, fixes three errors(result is 1x0 for each) continue, loades more to about 73%, screen says cannot finish loading in safe mode will continue after reboot. So it reboots and goes back to the first series described. Down loaded a fresh .ISO from windose site ran that off the cd same result. ran it from a USB plug, same result. Load Ubuntu 12.04 no problems no errors, works like a charm 1280 x 800 screen setting. Friend cannot get head into Ubuntu. Wants Win 7. use arconis disk, delete partitions repair disk, repair MBR, format NTFS, activate, try again, same results as described above. Be advised that I have already gone through the HP support advisors and no joy. Sorry for the long story. I am thinking that the "tattooing story" may be true. Any suggestions..... Please!
Is your HD set as ACHI or IDE? I have come across that ALOT as a problem why Windows will not load but other OS's will.
I cannot find a place to change that setting. I have to assume you are talking about in the Bios. HP being very proprietary does not give you much to work with in the Phoenix bios. F9 in the bios will reset to factory, that has been done.
Can you contact HP and see what the problem may be? Are you sure there isn't anything in the BIOS on what mode the Hard Drive should be running under?
Already gone through the HP site forum where HP employees answer questions. They thought it might be the video gpu but the video works well in Ubuntu for hours at 1280x 800, so it is not the VGA setting during boot working and the higher res not working. Have you heard of this "Tattooing" the motherboard and HD to work together theoretically to prevent MS pirating? What about the bios modding thing, I read some of the posts but did not get a clear idea if that would help. In fact the whole proceedure sounds like something complicated and risky.
There is a factory image on the refurb drive?? Test the refurb with manufacture specific software (deep-test). Pull the HDD and RAM out and reseat. As there appears to be problems with the refurb: do as locob suggests: