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Question

Compaq presario f700 not booting, blank screen

Feb 21, 2013 8:48AM PST

Specs:

Windows vista home premium
2gb of Ram (updated in september from 1)
everything else is stock

I have a problem where my laptop will not boot or show anything on the screen. what will happen is that when i press the power button, everything will light up like normally then it will shut off and cycle like this every 10-20 seconds. I have tried to do a hard reset, as well as trying to boot into bios, nothing works. Pressing f10 does get it to stay on but the hard drive light does not stay illuminated telling me that it is not being able to read the hard drive, so i tried to re-seat the drive but to no avail. also i tried hooking an external display and still no picture. I know i have a virus because i was trying a youtube to mp3 converter that even though it would uninstall, the icon would be glued to the desktop saying that i need special permission to delete it. then out of no where it disappeared. so i shut down like normal, then when i went to restart, it started normally, but there was no response from either my track pad or my keyboard (external ones did however work). but know i cant even boot to remove the virus. any help would be greatly appreciated

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Did you try it without that hard drive?
Feb 21, 2013 8:54AM PST

Some machines will do exactly what you wrote if the HDD is bad in some odd way.

Removing the hard drive and trying again may show it to behave a little better. Also, if that doesn't help, remove both sticks of RAM and put the original back in.
Bob

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Answer
I'd boot from a Ubuntu or BartPE disc and save data
Feb 21, 2013 8:59AM PST

After booting from a Ubuntu or BartPE disc and copying any data you want to save to an external hard drive or flash drive, I'd restore to factory settings. If you don't have the discs, try to get them from HP.

When you've gotten your system back like you want it, I urge you to get yourself an external hard drive and a good 3rd party backup program. You can set it up to do everything automagically at the time and frequency of your choice. 1 TB external hard drives are about $70 these days and a really good FREE backup program is the Easeus todo backup free which you can download from
http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm . That can save you a lot of time and frustration the next time something like this happens. Sooner or later it happens to all computers for one reason or another.

Good luck.

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all ready tried
Feb 21, 2013 9:42AM PST

Thanks for the suggestions, but i already tried to boot from the recovery discs (i have 3 of them) and nothing. also i already have all my data backed up onto an external hard drive as well. as for Bob, i did remove and re install the hard drive and again nothing. it does not seem to want to read the hard drive because the hard drive light will illuminate for a second then go out.

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You have more than a hard drive problem
Feb 21, 2013 11:43AM PST

If you can't boot from a CD or DVD, you've got a problem somewhere besides your hard drive. Not being able to get into BIOS setup means you've either got a power supply or motherboard problem. Sorry. Sad

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That's not what I asked to try.
Feb 22, 2013 12:28AM PST

I asked to remove the hard drive. And to clarify. Don't put it back in for the test.
Bob

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Thanks for the clarification
Feb 22, 2013 5:04AM PST

Sorry, I did not know what you meant when you said to remove the hard drive. Will do that now. Thanks for the ideas