MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
After powering down my home laptop in the normal way, it now won't start up. Literally all that happens is that therer's a blinking cursor in the top lefthand side of the screen.
A bit annoying, to put it mildly, though anything I value is backed up on an external drive.
Any ideas on how I can bring the machine back to life?
Does it go through it's BIOS startup process? Or does *all* it do is display the cursor?
Pop the battery out, pop it back in.
pop the hard drive out, pop it back in.
Ooh, and disconnect any USB devices and make sure the cd drive is empty.
if it goes through part of it's boot up, try and boot into safe mode. Give F3 a couple of wacks while it's starting up
All it does is display the cursor, nowt else.
Have tried the battery and HDD out options - no difference.
Doesn't do any part of the boot up - can't get to safe mode by pressing F8, which is what I'd normally do
with the hard drive out, try and start it up. Does it do anything more?
It now says "insert system disk in drive. Press any disk when ready."
Presumably hard drive is dead?
It's a good start I reckon. Do you have the ability to make a Linux LiveCD?
[url] http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download [/url]
That could prove that everything apart from the hard drive works fine.
Making a CD now, will see what happens. Presumably I take out hard drive, try to start from the CD?
yep
That one didn't work
PXE-E61 Media test failure
PXE-M0F Exiting Intel Boot Agent
Looks pretty still and lifeless from where I'm sitting.
doesn't sound great does it? You have the CD-ROM at the top of the boot list, yes?
Try removing your CMOS battery.
Tried that, it's just sitting there smugly laughing at me.
Dead as a dead thing, I reckon. I'll try a cheap PC repairer from the local paper - it's worth £50 to me to get photos off etc, but there's no point flogging a dead horse.