I have an HP Probook 4525s Laptop running Windows 7 (64 bit). The last three times I turned it on, after it having been turned off a while, it refused to boot at first. Some lights came on, but not the one that indicates that the hard drive is spinning, and the screen remained blank. The first time this happened, I held down the On switch until the lights went off again, and then tried turning on again, and after a couple of tries it started, and ran as normal. I thought things were OK and this was just one of those weird glitches.
However, the next time it happened I had to go through many more cycles of turning off with the On switch and then on again before it finally booted. Again, after boot, all seemed well. I did some hasty backing up of my more essential files, and turned off again. This time it seemed to take me still more tries before I finally got it going again. I tried booting off a rescue CD, but that did not seem to work quite right either, although eventually I was able to get to the setup (?) screen this way, from where I chose “Boot from hard drive as normal”, and lo-and-behold it did! Once again, after booting everything seemed to be fine - I am using it now to post this - but now I am scared to turn it off again. I guess I can leave it on, plugged in for now, and keep my fingers crossed, but it is not a very satisfactory situation.
So, how screwed am I? Apparently the hard drive is not dead, since, once booted, everything seems to be fine. Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong, or whether it is possible or worthwhile to have it repaired?
(My own WAG is that the cause is either an intermittently broken connection or a bad capacitor in the circuit that starts up the hard drive, but I could be wildly wrong, and even if I am right I have no idea how fixable that might be in a laptop.)
Also, do you think it would be safe to put it into “sleep” mode, or is it likely to have the same problem with waking up that it does with booting.