Laptop won't start.

Terry

HP Pavilion dv9700.

It turns on, the lights just above the keyboard flash, and then this just keeps happening.

Did a factory restore on Saturday night, and it was working fine.
Then the WiFi started to play up.

Turned it on tonight and the above happened.

I disconnected the wireless card, the RAM and the HDD one by one, and then all together, and still no joy.

Any suggestions?

FSL

Remove the hard drive and try booting from a usb stick or a bootable CD. If it boots then the problem is the Hard Drive.

Had a similar problem on a HP turned it on and it lit up lights then went out then came back on again in an endless cycle. Couldn't get into the BIOS or anything

I took out the hard drive connected it to another laptop using a powered sata to usb connection and the hard drive was borked. With the hard drive out the laptop booted fine from a usb stick.

Terry

Tried that this morning (with the HDD still attached). I missed the prompt to change the boot sequence, but it ended up starting fine anyway.

Had I been thinking, i would have run hi-jack this on it, but instead I attempted to restart it and try to boot from the flash drive.
It just went back to the way it was before, and like yourself, I can't even get into the BIOS.

I can't check if the HDD is borked or not because it doesn't have normal connections.

It's SATA, but with connections similar to IDE, so it won't fit into the slots on my 2.5" e-SATA enclosure.

FSL

Will it boot from the USB with the hard drive removed?

Terry

No. It doesn't stay on long enough to get to the boot stage.
Just restarts after about 3 seconds.

Freddy Smelly

Terry wrote: »

No. It doesn't stay on long enough to get to the boot stage.
Just restarts after about 3 seconds.

can you get into the bios menu?

if yes then it's likely a fault with your ram or cpu

if in the bios try setting the laptop to default settings (in case the cpu or ram was overclocked or incorrectly set)

zom

Terry wrote: »

It's SATA, but with connections similar to IDE, so it won't fit into the slots on my 2.5" e-SATA enclosure.

If you have just something like that:



on your disk, you can take it off (remove) and then use disk with enclosure.

You can as well try remove part of memory (RAM). If you have 2, try start on each one separately.

Terry

Freddy Smelly wrote: »

can you get into the bios menu?

if yes then it's likely a fault with your ram or cpu

if in the bios try setting the laptop to default settings (in case the cpu or ram was overclocked or incorrectly set)

I can't get into the BIOS. The screen doesn't even come on.

zom wrote: »

If you have just something like that:



on your disk, you can take it off (remove) and then use disk with enclosure.

You can as well try remove part of memory (RAM). If you have 2, try start on each one separately.

I didn't realise it could be removed.
I've done that, and am checking the HDD now. Cheers.

As for the RAM, I've already checked it.


It's just a bit odd because it did start properly this morning.