Strange laptop problem

king_of_inismac

Hey Guys,

I have another problem with the girlfriend's laptop. The machine is quite new and she was having problems with it for weeks, namely with the keyboard. Now it won't even boot.

I want to do a re-install on it, and maybe install win2k instead of the xp home edition she had on the laptop. However, when I switch on the lappie, it just goes as far as the first black screen, displaying the system memory etc. It doesnt check the drives for a boot disk etc....

basically I need the laptop to boot as far as the point where it checks the drives for bootable media...

Has anyone any ideas as to why it doesn't boot this far at least, or how I can solve it?

Thanks,
Martin

Saruman

How old is it??? If its new dont even try.. get warranty on it.

king_of_inismac

ITs just over a year old.

The warranty's out, thats why I'm trying to fix it

stevenmu

Does it give you the option of entering the BIOS setup ("Press F1/F2/Del for Setup" or something like that). If so, go in and look for an option to set everything to defaults. Then save changes and exit. If that doesn't work go back in and look for where it should be listing your hard disk cd drives etc and make sure that they're there. There probably listed as IDE 0/1 master/slave devices, if they're not there it'll probably give you an option to try and detect them.

king_of_inismac

Hey Steven,

Ya, I was looking at that last night as I wanted to change the bios so it would check the dvd drive first for booting. On the first screen it says press F2 to enter setup.

I did this, but it didnt go into the bios/setup menu, its like its just frozen???

stevenmu

Some of them can be kind of hard to get into, try pressing F2 as soon as you turn it on and just keep pressing it quickly (even if it starts beeping) and see if it goes in, laptops seem to be the worst for this for some reason.

If that doesn't work then it's likely your BIOS is borked, which explains why it won't boot. You may be able to reset it by leaving it unplugged, taking out the battery and removing the CMOS battery (it looks kind of like a big watch battery) that backs it up, there should be something in the laptops manual on removing the CMOS battery, or maybe the manufacturers website. Leave it like that for 10 minutes or so (a few seconds should do it but I've often seen people say 10-15 minutes so it's worth trying). Without any power at all the BIOS will revert to factory defaults.

If after putting the batteries back in it still won't boot or let you in to setup then there maybe some kind of hardware damage to the motherboard which you'll really need the manufacturer to look at

Mutant_Fruit

Plug out any USB devices (if any are attached). I doubt thats the problem, but i had a heart attack recently when i tried to boot my friends laptop (with over 100 hours of programming work done on it, that was to be handed in in just 2 hours) and it froze on the bios screen. Turned out it was because another guys Ipod was plugged into the USB port and that was stopping the computer from booting correctly.

I came so close to whipping out a screwdriver and transferring HD's

Saruman

Reseat all drives that you can like floppy, cd and hard drives.. might be loose connection and taking them out and putting them back in can fix.

Also... you can hold down as many keys as you can.. you SHOULD get a stuck key error on boot. If you still dont get that it just proves POST is not working and there is a hardware cause.. like above, possibly a peripheral/drive is not connected right.

king_of_inismac

Thanks for the help guys!

it might be a sticky key issue alright, cos the hash key use to become stuck intermittantly...