HP 14 laptop fully crashes after a few months…

[Plazorn]

Hello, a good friend of mine recently bought a computer from Costco, specifically an HP 14. It came bundled with McAfee, and Windows 11. However, after just a few months, you could no longer delete any files… you would select ‘delete’ and the file would reappear after a few seconds. My friend insisted on restarting it, so they did, and behold! A BSoD boot loop! And just like that, the computer would no longer boot. We tried
Startup repair, Reset, and numerous other Safe Mode options all to no avail, they threw up errors as well. What would have gone wrong?

(Also, recently they installed a very resource heavy video editing software about a month ago, it may have been a possible cause? )

 

[Hayato213]

McAfee is garbage, should just remove that, if it bootable he should take a look at the BSOD crash dump, in addition he can use reliability monitor to take a look at it.

https://winbuzzer.com/2022/01/05/ho...mory-dump-on-windows-11-or-windows-10-xcxwbt/

 

[Plazorn]

Thanks for the info! unfortunately his computer is non bootable… when it is powered on, a BSoD occurs. It then reboots and tries to repair itself, but fails.
Do you think he should reinstall windows? Or perhaps downgrade to windows 10?

 

[Hayato213]

Thanks for the info! unfortunately his computer is non bootable… when it is powered on, a BSoD occurs. It then reboots and tries to repair itself, but fails.
Do you think he should reinstall windows? Or perhaps downgrade to windows 10?

If his system can't recover from it then he might have to reformat, if it can take Windows 10, use windows 10, but he might have have problem if there is no windows 10 drivers.

 

[FAST6191]

You can try reinstalling it but from what you said then more likely is the hard drive died -- for general consumer stuff they are not going to do a burn in test on the hard drive and failures during the first few hundred hours are one of the major areas you expect to see failures. Costco usually have a pretty good return policy and if it is only a few months then consumer law tends to favour you anyway (90 day warranties tend to be the domain of second hand things).

If you need to get files off it then the hard drive sounds like it might function enough to start. To that end if you can boot off a live USB/live CD into Linux or something, fetch files from the drive (remember to grab the browser session/settings/data as well as that is most things on modern computers for people) and then return it then go for that.

 

[sombrerosonic]

Try to boot a Windows 11 install disk and click the "repair my computer" link. It should work i think. Ive done this to an old 10 computer and lord behold.... IT WORKED, hovever you HHD is ded. Happens to me once on my 7 laptop

 

[Plazorn]

Alright guys. @sombrerosonic, I tried the ‘repair’ link from a windows install disk, but that unfortunately did not work. I tried booting from a live Linux distro, but it seems like the PC’s drive was encrypted by McAfee, so I wasn’t able to extract anything. Thankfully, my friend didn’t have many important files saved. So I reinstalled Windows, and after installing the right drivers, his computer seems to work, or at least for now…The only thing that is bizarre, that worked before is that he can no longer use DaVinci Resolve, it will not recognize the GPU. Thanks for all the help.

 

[DinohScene]

Manually reinstall all drivers?

 

[Plazorn]

Manually reinstall all drivers?

like with CMD?

 

[DinohScene]

like with CMD?

Download them from the manufacturers website and install them.
I assume you installed drivers via Windows update?