I need laptop help!

[Tandyman100]

Okay, so I have an HP ZV6000 that did not have a power brick. I go to a local place, and see that they have one for $45. Not wanting to spend that much for no reason, I go get the laptop, and plug it in and test the power brick before buying it. The laptop pops up to an old installation of XP. Cool, I'll repair it when I get home. When I get home, I boot it up with the repair CD (which it had booted from not 10minutes before), and nothing. Just a little blinking cursor in the top-right.

I've tried every BIOS setting there is, reset the BIOS, and I've tried booting from every CD and thing in the house. No CD-ROM boot, no HDD boot, and I don't have an external floppy or the ability to network boot.

1GB of RAM, ATi graphics, Athlon 64, DVD drive, 100GB Hard drive.

Please help me.

 

[GhostGT]

Let me see if I understand this correctly...

Your laptop was running fine until you plugged it into the local power brick you found? And now, you can't boot into anything at all other than the BIOS? Or does that not even show up?

 

[Tandyman100]

Let me see if I understand this correctly...

Your laptop was running fine until you plugged it into the local power brick you found? And now, you can't boot into anything at all other than the BIOS? Or does that not even show up?

No, the laptop was bought used. It worked fine when I plugged into the local power brick, then I brought it home....

Yes, I can get into the BIOS, but that's it. No CD, no Hard Drive. Nothing.

 

[Silent Wolf]

well, when I need to boot up my computer from a different drive, I hit Escape. then a little window pops open to see which device to boot from

 

[Tandyman100]

I know, and I've tried that with both the CD drive and the HDD. Nothing. Same flashing cursor.

 

[cboucher]

Try a BIOS reset. Unplug the PC, open the cover and look for a big watch battery looking thing. If it's not soldered to the motherboard, you can pop it out for a few seconds and put it back in to reset BIOS. Otherwise, there is probably a jumper labeled CMOS RST or CMOS RESET or something similar. You move the jumper into the other position, plug the PC back in and turn it on for a few seconds. Then turn it off, unplug it, put the jumper back in the original position and plug in/turn on. If you have the manual for the motherboard, then look it up first before trying.

 

[Tandyman100]

Reset the RAM chip, and now it boots, but hangs in different places on different OSes.

In my Ubuntu live disk, it hangs right after you press "try ubuntu without any change to your computer" and you have just a black screen. In my XP CD, it hangs during the blue screen "Setup is now starting Windows" right before you choose the drive to install to. My Vista install disk doesn't even initiate.

Clues?

 

[foothead]

Try running the ubuntu liveCD's memtest.

 

[Tandyman100]

^You read my mind.

I'm also going to do a complete teardown and see if it's just an overheating problem or something.