Hello, I have two HP DV9700 laptops. Both came with Windows Vista and I wanted to upgrade to Windows 7. So I formatted the primary partition and I installed Windows 7 with the DAZ loader. I also kept the Windows Vista recovery partition incase I wanted to go back. The first laptop is running smoothly after installing Windows 7 but I am having problems with the second. Sometimes it will boot to the desktop but most of the time it hangs after the loading screen but nevers boots to the desktop. I get the black Windows 7 loading screen then the Windows logo disappears leaving with a black screen. I have to do a hard shutdown. When I turn it back on, it gives me a menu to do a "Startup Repair" or "Start Windows Normally". When I do Startup Repair, it finds an unknown problem. It attempts to repair but after awhile it can not. When I am able to boot to the desktop, I sometimes get the blue screen of death stating something about a Physical Memory Dump. I reformatted and reinstalled Windows 7 three times and I get the same result. Has anyone else encountered this issue? Is this problem software related or is it the hard disk coming to an end?
In this case its very likly that either your HDD or RAM is damaged, but it could also be a really nasty Driver bug affecting this configuration, if Safe Mod works it could be a driver, if safe mode doesnt work, its most likly hardware error. You can ram the memory test tool windows7 ships with, it's in the boot selection menu. Or if you can boot up you can type in "Windows Memory Diagnostics" or skip this step and use the RAM stick of your other Laptop inside your broken one, much faster.
I don't think its your HDD. Its almost certainly a software issue - my 10 bucks goes for a graphics/driver problem. Try this - see if you can login to Windows. Then, if you do, uninstall the graphics drivers i.e. set to Standard VGA or look for a driver that doesn't cause the problem. Trial and erro is the only way to go for such scenarios
I ran the Windows ram test with no errors. As for the video drivers, I am using the same video driver from the nVidia website on both laptops and I am not having any issues with the other laptop. I am able to go into Safe Mode. I just uninstalled the nVidia driver and seems to be working for now but I am forced to use the generic driver and can't set the screen to it's full resolution.I will keep testing in this mode for a few days and see what happens. Thank you for your help.