HP Pavilion dv4000 laptop, XP Home. A customer brought in his laptop saying that the only way to get it to start after pressing the power button was to give it a slight bump or shake. Sure enough, on checking I found that after pressing the start button all of the led's came on (power, hard drive, etc.), but nothing was actually happening; it didn't even try to boot. But if I slightly lifted one end of the unit off the table, it would boot. I didn't shake or bump it all all - only lifted it up on one end.
After checking the hard drive, I found a number of bad sectors. The drive was definately damaged and in need of replacing. It seemed logical that perhaps the read/write heads or actuator arms were sticking a bit and needed the slight change of position to kick-start them into action and that this slight violence had caused some disk damage. There were also other strange operating system issues going on (randomly functioning USB ports, etc.).
I made an image of the drive, wrote the image to a new drive, installed the new drive in the laptop and did an inplace reinstall of the operating system to repair any file damage carried over from the image of the bad drive. Afterwards the drive booted up normally and all of the operating system strange behaviors were gone. I thought it was fixed. Then I shut it down and came back a couple of hours later to start it up again only to discover that the same start-up issue had returned - the lights were on, but nobody was home! But when I slightly lifted the unit on one end, it started up again just like before! I was sure tha the problem was all attributed to the hard drive, but apprently not. Has anyone out there ever heard of this before???
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