Greetings and welcome,
Well, I can definitely give you a list of different linux distributions that
could work on an HP Pavilion laptop:
- Sabayon
- Ubuntu
- OpenSuSE
- Linux Mint
- Fedora
And, those are just a few of the easy ones to get up and running with. There are other versions that might have a better chance at getting some of the proprietary hardware up and running (if there is any), but you would have to know more about the actual hardware that the laptop in question is running.
HTH. Let us know.