NationStates Jolt Archive

Compaq Presario, forget the specs, just got it 1 year, ago, won't go past the "Compaq" screen. Is not responding to keyboard... esc, F1, F10... nothing. Mouse jack is ****ed, but worked anyway... last used 7-8 hours ago- worked fine then, not now.

Compaq Presario, forget the specs, just got it 1 year, ago, won't go past the "Compaq" screen. Is not responding to keyboard... esc, F1, F10... nothing. Mouse jack is ****ed, but worked anyway... last used 7-8 hours ago- worked fine then, not now.
sounds like the boot sector is corrupted. can you use a boot disk/recovery disk to bring the pc up?

All you have to do is initiate phone dialling and yellow page look up paramaters.

Compaq Presario, forget the specs, just got it 1 year, ago, won't go past the "Compaq" screen. Is not responding to keyboard... esc, F1, F10... nothing. Mouse jack is ****ed, but worked anyway... last used 7-8 hours ago- worked fine then, not now.
This is beyond me. I could guess that your BIOS is fucked. You could try to reset your CMOS yourself, but you'd be much better taking that sucker to Future Shop.

If it can't even get to the BIOS and start to boot the OS, you almost certainly have a corrupted BIOS and/or a fundamental hardware problem. So it's not an accessible software problem (if it had been a little later that it crapped out, I would have had you start it in safe mode), and it may be a fried motherboard.

I'd take it to a local computer repair business. This is almost certainly beyond the layman's ability to fix. They'll inspect the hardware, maybe remove the motherboard and try to boot the BIOS independently, etc.

If it can't even get to the BIOS and start to boot the OS, you almost certainly have a corrupted BIOS and/or a fundamental hardware problem. So it's not an accessible software problem (if it had been a little later that it crapped out, I would have had you start it in safe mode), and it may be a fried motherboard.

I'd take it to a local computer repair business. This is almost certainly beyond the layman's ability to fix. They'll inspect the hardware, maybe remove the motherboard and try to boot the BIOS independently, etc.
If vital hardware was fried, it would start beeping at him. Prolly just a mess BIOS.

If vital hardware was fried, it would start beeping at him. Prolly just a mess BIOS.
Well sometimes … I have had an actual bad DIMM act like that on my board. No sound response but when I moved all the ram to not use the outside dimm there was no issue

(Not an issue cause I have 6 DIMMS)


But as to his problem Notable issues

Possible causes from top to bottom with the little info I have so far

Bios
Ram
PSU
HDD or controller failure

Optical Drive

What I would do first (because of ease)

1 Change out PSU try it
2 Pull both sticks of ram and swap them around as well every combination to eliminate a stick and bad dims
3 Swap IDE or SATA channel to eliminate the channel itself
4 Unplug all other drives
5 Bios flash (first try a reset to default software reset if you can get in there)


Other Ideas of note try new keyboard and mouse have had issues with stuck keys making bios act funny

Are there any sounds? A series of beeps, perhaps?

Buggered if i know. reset the bios by unplugging the computer and removing the battery for half an hour or so, but it sounds like a hardware problem.