Motherboard not recognizing hard drive

Hello all,

i have a major problem with an HP dv9500 notebook, with vista home premium. it shut down and when i tried to boot it again it sent me to system recovery. while in system recovery one of the scans returned "hard drive not found". So I used the HDD check in the BIOS and it says "10009 replace hard drive". I also used Seatools for dos on a CD and it says that the hard drive is working fine. so i called HP to see what they had to say. He told me that the "motherboard is not recognizing the hard drive" and i could send it in for $300! this wouldn't be so bad i suppose if i hadn't been plauged with problems with this thing from the get go. 1) had to get graphics card replaced as it crashed 2) had to do a system recovery because all internet capability crashed ie: no WiFI, no Ethernet. Upon researching these problems i have found that this problems have been common with this series of pavillion notebooks, so much so they extended the warranties a an extra year. Mine unfortunately did not qualify.

is anyone familiar with the problems these HPs are having? is this sort of problem easily fixable for a DIY tech noob? or should I just bite the bullet and send it back to HP? I am very put off by them as this seems to be a very big problem that many others are experiencing, and all they doing is charging me for something that should have been recalled.

system info: HP Pavillion dv9500; Core 2 Duo T5250; 2Gb RAM; Phoenix BIOS v.F.58; 2 hard drives first 120Gb Seagate SATA w/ OS files, Second is 100 Gb media files.

also at first i removed the drive from slot one and blew some dust out (NES style!) put the drive back in and it booted and worked for a day now i cannot get it to boot at all. any help or advice is very much appreciated.

thanks

The likely cause is heat damage which in turn is caused by a bad fan algorithm in the BIOS.

http://aldeby.org/blog/index.php/h [...] links.html

Hope your system isn't fried. The HP help desk didn't point you here? Strange and unfriendly.

Mike Ramsey

Fry's electronics (in store only) has an emachines athlon laptop with 250gb hardrive and 2 gigs of memory for $299 (dallas location, but probably at others also). Staples will have a full size acer on sale for $299 starting 7/5. They may not be as nice as your hp, but I wouldn't suggest spending $300 on any motherboard. Yours probably overheated; some of the heatsinks in notebooks are pretty small. Only other suggestion is to open your laptop and check the heatsink fan and see if it's still working. That would be an easy fix.

I use "perfect duster" a canned air product sold at some Fry's electronics. It has a solvent that evaporates quickly and cleans any fans for smoother operation. I would recommend you clean the power supply and cpu heatsink fans at least once a year to prevent gunk. I've seen it so bad that a fan won't turn anymore. Just spray it on and your fan should run faster. You can also try using the motherboard cmos jumper. With the system turned off, move the jumper over one position keeping 2 of the pins covered and one open, then return the jumper to the original position. Can't hurt anything to try.

Unless you know somebody with a copy of Micro 2000's Universal Diagnostic Toolkit,
http://www.micro2000.com/toolkit/index.php

then it's time to start looking. At nearly $600, none of my friends own the Universal Diagnostic Toolkit.

Sorry for your loss.

Mike Ramsey