HP Pavilion Boot Loop Problem

Yesterday I ran into a devil of a time with a HP Pavilion slimline workstation at work. This machine was beyond it’s warranty with HP, so no help from them. I had a machine that presented these symptoms:

  • Computer powers up normally.
  • All BIOS-level diagnostics pass.
  • No error codes or beep codes whatsoever.
  • Once the HP BIOS Splash screen fades, the computer should boot into Windows. In this case, Windows 7. It does not. The computer reboots into the HP BIOS Splash screen. Ad infinitum.
  • You can enter BIOS Setup, you can also access the Boot Menu to select other boot sources, however the F11 key to start System Restore is unresponsive.
  • All first-tier efforts to clear the error were taken. BIOS reset to factory conditions, as well as holding down the power button to clear the power supply controller. None of these resolved the issue.

I then plugged in a copy of Knoppix that I downloaded and installed on a USB memory stick. I could have also burned the ISO file to a DVD and used that as well, but the USB was handy. When I use Knoppix this way, I like to enter this “Knoppix Startup Cheatcode” into the prompt right after it boots: “knoppix 2” (without quotes, of course) and this starts the Knoppix system in  the INIT 2 run level, which is single-mode text only interface. I don’t need X-Windows, and in this case, that just gets in the way.

Once at the CLI for Knoppix, I figured the boot flag, the boot manager, or the MBR was shot for the primary partition on the hard drive in the machine. Diagnostics indicated that the primary hard drive was fine, so it wasn’t a physical failure in the HD. I knew that the first (and only) hard drive in systems like these were most likely /dev/sda, you could search the “dmesg” log if you have doubt on where in the /dev the primary hard drive is. Knoppix has the “fdisk” command, so that was my next stop. I knew that this particular HP machine had a Windows Recovery partition stuffed in it, so when I started “fdisk” I displayed the partition map and there were three partitions: /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda4. I looked at the sizes and figured that the biggest one was the damaged partition, the middle one was probably for swap or scratch or something, and the last one seemed sized properly for the recovery partition. Honestly it was a guess. I turned the bootable flag on for /dev/sda4 and then off for /dev/sda1, then wrote the partition map to disk and then issued the command “shutdown -r now” to reboot out of Knoppix. Technically you could have just unplugged the machine, but I’m a big fan of orderly shutdowns even when the consequences are irrelevant – it’s a good habit to have.

The machine booted to the HP BIOS Splash screen, and then Windows Recovery started. Once the recovery partition got going I noticed a cutesy HP menu appeared offering me a selection of options. I started out with the simplest option which was something like “Microsoft Windows Boot Recovery” and it ran for maybe a second and then offered to reboot. I went for the reboot and that fixed the issue. Windows started but instead of a regular startup it went to the recovery menu, which I found fine since that was where I was going to go anyways by pounding the F8 button like a madman. I selected “Safe Mode With Networking” and then plugged in my USB memory stick containing TRON and got TRON working on the system.

Once TRON was done, I rebooted and let chkdsk naturally freak out about the structure of the NTFS partition in /dev/sda1. Chkdsk did what it had to do, and the system booted normally. I then set it for redeployment.

I figure if anyone else has this issue, this blog post might be helpful. If it helped you out, and you’re willing, maybe dropping a wee tip in Bitcoin or Dogecoin would definitely be appreciated.

BSD and Linux Tryouts – Four Distributions

I’ve got a pile of dead hardware that I’m going to be surplussing soon here at work and much of it won’t be able to handle Microsoft Operating Systems, either because the system lacks a restore partition or lacks a Microsoft licensing sticker to make the install of Windows XP work properly. So we’ll have to live without Windows, which means some other operating system. There are four that I’m looking at currently:

  • PC-BSD
  • Linux Mint 17
  • ElementaryOS
  • CentOS

Generally I think none of these are really ready for prime-time consumer use, but maybe I’ll be surprised.

Throwback Thursday

Since I’ve been journaling so very much I’ve got a lot of memories stored up in my Journal. Here’s a slice of my life for the past September 25th’s:

2003 – Refilled toner cartridges are all the rage, and I put a kibosh on them because they are a terrible idea. Working on other peoples computers proves to be a gory biological hazard at every turn. Grand Theft Auto 3 makes kids kill. Moonies make a surprise return and surprise everyone with their bigotry. Congress did something! They passed the FTC Do Not Call List.

2006 – Jerry Falwell referred to Hilary Clinton as worse than Lucifer. Tee Hee!

2007 – I got my first iPod Touch. What a long wonderful journey it has been with Apple, man, the memories. 🙂

2008 – I was enjoying a good ten-minutes hate on Microsoft and Java. At work I started interviewing S3’s.

2009 – I was drinking quite heavily to cope with my awful days. Drop.io was still around, and OIT was making it difficult to use, what a shocker. I started thinking about drugs like Xanax to help me cope with my difficult days. Work issues abound, failures left and right. Some sort of Jazz Ensemble at a local eatery tortured out some music.

2010 – Legend of the Guardians in the movies, enjoyed it quite a lot. Lots of noisy twitter noise.

2011 – SyFy asked what shows we liked, all the ones they cancelled. LOL.

2012 – Resistance using the Help Desk Ticketing System shows up. Search for S3 internally falls flat on it’s face, not really surprised. Love for Waze, enjoying social navigation. Closet hanger in Hobbiton failed, I fixed it, after a while of battling with it.

Koval Single Barrel Oat Whiskey

photo by:

Addressing Balance In The Force

You can’t really have a lot of negative things in your head just mobbing out all the good things that also have happened. To that end, today I have a particular real humor-based life preserver brought to me by the Apple Spotlight twitter account. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and this is worth a million billion bajillion lulz:

 

downgrade_discount

 

This pleases me.