Posted on 12/09/2010 9:57:56 PM PST by Kevin in California
Can anyone help me out here. My other laptop is having an issue. I cannot get the thing to boot up. I turn it on and I get a black screen (desktop icons won't appear) with a blinking cursor in the top left corner of the screen. And, sometimes it powers down by itself.
Is there a way I can do some type of reset?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Post the make, model, age and if you installed any new hardware or software recently. What were you doing on it the last time it was working?
Original battery?
Hi Veni...it’s an HP dv5000. I was doing a virus scan which was nothing out of the norm. And, I was on AC power. I am 100% certain it’s not a battery issue.
Is there some kind of reset I can do?
Thanks
If you turn off the computer and then turn it back on - start pressing the “F” keys [usually F2, F8, F10, or F12] as soon as it starts up. You can press them randomly as it boots up.
One of these keys is going to get you to the Startup Routine. Then, boot up in Safe Mode. Once in Safe Mode, got to Start, Help and Support, then undo changes using System Restore.
Pick a date before your computer started futzing up ...
techping.
just a guess with little to go on..
this is a low battery. Even when plugged into the wall some laptops won’t boot with a low or bad battery. Let in charge a while or remove battery and try to boot,
Pay your local computer store 50 bucks to fix it for you and save yourself hours/days of aggravation and frustration.
Any error messages at all?
Any external devices plugged in? If so, unplug them, and boot it up again to see what happens.
HD crash
If you’re getting a blinking cursor, you’re not booting into Windows. It’s likely a hard drive issue, although it may be a motherboard issue.
Watch your BIOS during boot up. The computer may not see the C: drive. I’ve been having a similar issue with one of my computers. It’s a BIOS issue on the motherboard.
If you can get into BIOS (press Del, F keys, Ins, or whatever your computer needs) then there may be tests inside that you can run. If you do, make sure you don't select a destructive test (with write on HDD.)
One simple test would be to stick a bootable CD or DVD into the drive and restart the laptop. If it boots from the disk and talks to you then you should be fairly sure that your Windows committed harakiri and you need to reinstall. If your backups are recent and good then it's not a problem. If you don't know what a backup is ... then you need some local help from a competent tech. It will involve, probably, booting Linux off of a DVD, loading the NTFS driver and copying your data over the network or USB.
All,just pulled the battery and am now running on AC. Nothing external hooked up to it. When I press the “F” keys, it just beeps.
Maybe the $50 is a good option.
Sigh......
hmmm. Others are reporting the same to HP
Ah, here you go
HP has this issue, sounds quite common
I’ve seen this happen on a couple of my Dells with bad capacitors on the mother board. One went gradually (it would boot after a couple of tries) and the other went all at once. Dell said I had to replace the entire MB, which I didn’t bother doing. If you can’t even get to the bios, you are kind of screwed. But as a last resort you might try to see if you can boot from a recovery disk or a linux boot disk.
If you have access to another computer, with high speed internet, download and burn a Linux live CD. You can then
try to boot the laptop with the live CD to see if its a problem with Windoze or if its a real hardware gremlin.
Got to Distrowatch.com and look in the right column for Linux live CD downloads. Use your cd/dvd burn app to burn the Image.
It will be an .iso file and probably about 700MB. Be sure to download a “32 bit” file.
Try Mint. It boots on my Toshiba laptop. Good luck.
You can enter BIOS not at any time but only first few seconds after the computer is powered up. You should see something on the screen (I see the Fujitsu logo, for example) and it should be written there what to press to enter BIOS. You should have a couple of seconds to do that. If you don't, the computer just goes ahead and boots up (or tries, in your case.)
Try to boot off of the Windows DVD if you have it. If you have only the recovery DVD it is also bootable (they are built for bare metal restore.) I would use a Linux DVD, of course :-)
Smash the frikin thing and get a new one that works.
Christmas is coming.
Try Greysard’s suggestions of booting from cd/dvd.
If he is getting a beep when he presses it with the white cursor, that is a bad sign.
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