Hey guys and girls,

 

I have a friend with an HP laptop that is black screening directly after the HP logo. 

 

Originally, he was getting a SMART failure warning of an imminent HD failure.  Unfortunately, he ignored this for a month or so.  It got to the point where he could only boot into safe mode without issue but trying to boot into XP proper gave a blank screen directly after the XP logo.

 

I got the drive imaged with acronis (there were a couple of minor read failures) and loaded the image onto a new drive.  I then installed the new drive.

 

The SMART error is gone but the problem remains.  Safe mode works like a charm, but XP otherwise fails to load after the XP logo goes away.  There is occassional HD activity at this point and I have advised him to let it sit overnight.

 

Failing that, does anyone have any ideas?  He doesn't have an OS CD, though there was a recovery partition on the HD (which may or may not be damaged as well).

 

As a last ditch effort, I used system restore to go back in time a month or so.  The problem was still there.

 

I'm open to thoughts.  I have plenty of XP CDs, but I don't assume they'll work with his product key if I  try a repair installation.