Okay, you know what? Let's start all this over, because the problem finally seems to be stabilizing into, well, one problem, instead of many. I recently installed a 500gb Western Digital into my laptop. It worked for a while, but I started having a problem. Every time I try to boot up my laptop, I get a BSoD. Error code 0x000000f4. It restarts my COMPUTER AUTOMATICALLY after the error, and tells me WINDOWS was shut down improperly. It then runs a chkdsk. These two processes are fixed every single time: taskkill.exe and taskeng.exe. If I attempt to boot up in safe mode, it just stops at the loading screen, and eventually restarts. I already did a system restore to before this was happening, it didn't help.

This BSoD always happens at the login screen. I click my account, type in my password, and hit enter. It goes to the welcome screen, and after a minute the screen turns black, though the mouse is still visible and movable. Then I get the error. I already checked my HDD's connection the laptop, and it is not loose. I highly doubt that this is another component of my laptop, because I had completely different problems before. Reinstalling Vista does not appear to help. I would prefer to not have to try it again.

I'm running Vista 64 Home on a HP Pavilion dv5. 500 gb Western Digital HDD.hmmmm...If you have reinstalled vista you've ruled that out. that error code is for an OS thread, and the fact that you can't boot into safe mode, leads me to think maybe it's the physical drive. is that a new drive, and what problems were you having before?Torrent Vista...

Sorry but i'll pass on this one.The problem I had with the last hard drive (250gb Hitachi) was that it would freeze constantly and all over the place. Especially if I was doing installs. No MATTER how many times I reinstalled vista, this happened. I was told (on this forum, actually) that it was most likely a bad hard drive. So I replaced it with my WD 500 gb. This drive is not new, but it is less than 8 months (though the hard drive in the computer was less than 18). When I first installed this drive, I had the same error code right away. So, naturally, I reinstalled it, since this was the first I had seen of the thing. The laptop would not boot up. It would freeze right before the Vista loading bar. This happened well over 20 times. Then, it just... started leading me to a command prompt. A command prompt that did not accept any commands, like chkdsk. So I reinstalled Vista again... And it worked. Everything was perfect and beautiful. For nine hours, perfect. Then I closed the laptop when I went to sleep, opened it up when I woke up, restarted it (since I had installed a mouse) and, lo-and-behold, freezing. I restarted it, and error screen. It did a chkdsk, but that didn't help. Then, the chkdsks started freezing. It said my master file table on my recovery drive (which was empty) was corrupt. So, I did a system restore to before I installed the mouse, and now I get only the error screen.

Sorry about the wall of text, and thank you for responding.


@Patio - I think you may be right on this one. And PLUS, I would be happy to no longer have to deal with all this HP crapware they supplied me with.