What's this Laptop's failure?

[HardDriv'n]

Hi there.

I'm attempting to figure what is wrong with my brother's laptop here. His laptop is a >>Gateway P-6831FX Notebook<<, with a 250GB >>WDC WD2500BEVS-22UST0-(S1)<< Western Digital drive.

Recently, he had decided to completely wipe his HDD, because a lot of his games were crashing on him. So, I decided to try it for him, and went about to partitioning the drives for him. He wanted a primary for his Vista OS (Home Premium), and 4 logical drives in an extended partition.

These were the issues I ran into:

1. The BOOT & BIOS screens show some type of graphical errors. It's like a grid of blue dots overlapping the normal display screens.

2. If attempting to boot from a disc using DOS, or ISOLINUX, as the boot means, all the lettering is slightly garbled. Most letters are off by one alphabet placement -> xorf (xorg), diafonsthb (diagnostic).

3. Won't let me boot all the way into a Linux Live disc. Puppy, and Ubuntu, Linux stop/freeze after the graphics driver selection screen (xorg <-> xvesa).

4. Reinstalling Windows Vista takes waaaaayyyyyy longer than it should, each step where something else needs loaded results in a several minute delay. Boot to Install screen, install screen to formatting screen, formatting, selecting drive to actual install progress screen, etc...

5. Any type of Windows Vista console startup takes minutes to load up -> services.msc, diskmgmt.msc, etc...

6. Windows wont let me create an extended partition, only primary.

7. I downloaded the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS official HDD bootable disc for this model >>here<<, and attempted to run it. It flashes some boot text, and then just hangs without going to the menu.

Help please? Any recommendations for diagnosing this?

[puntoMX]

1. The BOOT & BIOS screens show some type of graphical errors. It's like a grid of blue dots overlapping the normal display screens.

Check the RAM, take out the battery and open the part where the RAM is placed, re-seat the RAM and check if the problem is gone. If not, use memtest86+ boot-able ISO (CD/USB).

If that's not it, the NVIDIA 8800M GTS or the motherboard needs to be replaced...

[bonestonne]

I second Punto, but i'm way more inclined to say it's a bad motherboard. I can't tell you how many laptops i've seen at work with bad motherboards in the past two weeks.

[Ponch]

6. Windows wont let me create an extended partition, only primary.

Probably because there is one already ?