No Post, No Bios, No Boot From CD

I have no idea what is going on...

I posted to this forum about our other HP desktop:
Need Diagnostic Help - Seems to be Dead
and now other other HP desktop (with the identical motherboard) is now failing as well.

This one is a pc6000, and all I ever get is the screen that displayes the BIOS, processor, CPU speed and the 4 memory banks. So far, so good. Then it says Initializing USB controllers..
Done
Then several blank lines before it says
Press <F10> to enter Setup

Then nothing... although sometimes after the 'Done' line it says
1st Drive: None
2nd Drive: None
3rd Drive: None
4th Drive: None
00 USB mass storage devices found and configured
befire going to a new screen where it says

Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot media in selected Boot device and press a key

Pressing any key just redisplays the msg.

What could possible be going on with these 2 nearly identical HP desktops with the same mobo?

Same results with a Windows 7 Home Premium CD in the drive.

can you get into your bios and under boot look and see if there are any drives listed?
do you have more then 1 drive in your system?
if not and you see a drive in your boot make it's listed first place.

scrooge

scrooge said:

can you get into your bios

No. F10 does nothing.

thefabe said:

Have you tried using a different drive cable or power connection?
Or a different sata connection?
It sounds as if your not getting any power to any of your drives.

Fabe

Well, I did already hook up a different power supply, which would have meant different SATA HDD power cable and power connectors. I didn't try a different data connector because both data cables to the HDD and the CDROM look new, and it would seem absurd for both of them to fail simultaneously.

I also connected the hard drive to this XP PC as an external, and it gets read just fine. Scanned it w/ MalwareBytes and it was clean.

Hi, it sounds like your boot record file(s) are corrupted and or deleted/hidden away due to malware/virus activity.

I can't be certain of that, but would recommend downloading msert.exe from Microsoft (it's free, comes in two flavours - 32 or 64 bit and have a 10 day life from date of download. It's a malware & antivirus program all-in-one that will automatically repair/delete any malicious item it finds).

You mentioned having an XP machine that can scan the harddrive - so you need to download the 32 bit version to scan the problematic drive. Don't use registry programs as they can make the fixing more complicated if not impossible. Let us know waht transpires - good luck.

Paul

PaulSoebekti said:

Hi, it sounds like your boot record file(s) are corrupted and or deleted/hidden away due to malware/virus activity.

I can't be certain of that, but would recommend downloading msert.exe from Microsoft (it's free, comes in two flavours - 32 or 64 bit and have a 10 day life from date of download. It's a malware & antivirus program all-in-one that will automatically repair/delete any malicious item it finds).

Paul

Thanks Paul. I hooked up the drive to my trusty XP and am currently running a custom scan on the K: drive. Msert apparently always wants to scan the C: drive of whatever PC it's on, so it took a while to get to the K: drive, So far it's scanned a quarter million files (only 25% complete) & found 12 infections.

Will keep you posted,

Thanks, I have PM you just now.
Good night.

The scan finished and I corrected all errors. Then I put it back in the chassis and booted. This time I got a CD drive lited as drive 1 and the hard drive listed as drive 2. I let it boot normally, and allowed it to sit on the signin screen with our 3 user names. Two hours later I returned to find it back on the same old screen
1st Drive: None
2nd Drive: None
3rd Drive: None
4th Drive: None
00 USB mass storage devices
Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot media in selected Boot device and press a key

I shut it off, removed the power cord and let it sit. An hour later I tried it again. Once again I had drive media listed and I booted into safe mode. I entered the user password on the signin screen and went to the black screen with safe mode in all 4 corners. And nothing. No icons. No taskbar. No nothing. Oh wait... the mouse worked. CTL/Alt/Del did nothing. After an hour I turned it off and rebooted. And got back to the empty drive screen.

Does anyone have an idea? Is it the mobo?