DV9205tx help - troubleshoot

[Karyn]

Hi everyone,

I've been looking through forums for ideas on what's caused my notebook to stop working, but I'm coming up short for anything as specific as what I have.
I'm attempting to troubleshoot as much as I can for myself because, of course, it's one month out of warranty and I don't want to spend a lot of money sending it off only to have it come back as "irrepairable" (this has happened to me before!).
It is a HP pavilion dv9205tx notebook, purchased February last year, with Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T7200 (2.0 GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 667MHz FSB), NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7600, dual hard drives, Vista Ultimate, and all the other usual specs (http://h20195.www2.hp.com/PDF/c00847789.pdf). When I first got it, I had to have the screen replaced under warranty, so I note that it has had monitor issues before...

The problem. It started during hot weather, where if I left the computer alone for a while, the screen would switch off (backlight remain on) and computer became unresponsive. A forced reboot solved the problem the first few times, however one time I rebooted, the screen wouldn't come on again (only the backlight comes on). I plugged in an external monitor, and it shows up on there, so the rest of this was done via external monitor;upon loading windows I got a BSOD and wouldn't load. I entered safe mode, scheduling disk checks and rolling back drivers, however after disk checks (which were incredibly, incredibly slow) even safe mode wouldn't load, showing a BSOD and rebooting, and the external monitor screen started showing strange artifacts (green boxes, misplaced segments) during booting. I tried a few things, such as "last known good configuration" and VGA mode but it still wouldn't work. After figuring out I could stop the reboot, I got this from the BSOD message;
'Attempt to reset display driver and recover from timeout failed' and under technical information it mentioned nvlddmkm.sys. I believe I read somewhere that this could be bypassed on booting by going through the BIOS, but that's where it gets weirder - if I attempt to enter the BIOS, the computer reboots.

Does anyone have any ideas what this could possibly be?? I've tried all the HP troubleshooting ideas (reseating RAM, removing battery, etc) and it hasn't made a scrap of difference. If anyone here has some thoughts that could help me, or other ideas I can try, please let me know. I tried to be specific but if there's anything else you want to ask please do!

Thanks,
Karyn

[v3loc1ty2.0]

the graphics card is probably dying
that would explain the artifacts and the non-working internal screen

[Karyn]

Yeah, I thought as much - I guess I hoped there were more options to try. Also does that explain why it won't allow me access to the BIOS?
Do you know if it is possible to replace the graphics card without too much hassle? If I could do it myself it would save a lot of money.

Thanks,
Karyn

[flipfire]

wait before you do anything silly.

nvklmddkm.sys is part of the nvidia driver. Ive actually had this BSOD before when i installed a driver. I just had to change to a different one to get rid of it

Have you tried to do a recovery install or a clean install? You definately need to rule out a software issue first.

What version BIOS are you using?

[v3loc1ty2.0]

replacing the graphics card is nearly impossible...
like flipfire said, make sure its not a software issue

[Karyn]

I can't even get into windows to change the driver, though I did do some rollbacks when I was able to, so it's not the latest nvidia driver on there.
I don't know what BIOS I am running, how can I check it?
Also I haven't tried an install, as my vista disc got totalled. I have my xp one around but I hoped I wouldn't have to go back to that :P Worth a try though?

Thanks,
Karyn