Solved From Startup Repair endless loop to no boot at all

[barnesberic]

Hi, everyone. First post in this forum. I appreciate any advice you can offer me. Here's the story: My HP laptop (about 5-years old, Windows 7 Home 64 bit), which showed no signs of performance problems beyond what you'd expect for a five-year old machine, suddenly shut off. Not a proper shutdown sequence. Just BANG -- off. As if suddenly all power was yanked.

Then it automatically started booting again, but it could not complete the boot. It got about as far as the Windows splash and then booted again. This time, it presented the option of doing a Startup Repair. (This screen here.) Running Startup Repair, it could get as far as Loading Files or, once or twice, even as far as the actual Windows Startup Repair tool, but it never completed a repair and kept rebooting in an endless Startup Repair loop.

Now, almost all of the time, it doesn't boot anything at all. Not even BIOS. When I hit the power button, the fans run (and possibly the HD spins? hard to tell), but nothing else happens. Every once in a while, it can boot a little bit, and I can get into the BIOS settings, but those times are becoming fewer and fewer. It hasn't booted anything at all since mid-yesterday.

At first I assumed the boot files somehow became corrupted, but the initial weird shutoff and the recent inability to do anything at all except spin fans is making me wonder if this isn't a hardware problem. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

 

[GokAy]

Try loading defaults in BIOS.
Try remove battery/AC adapter/RAMs and press and hold power button for 30 seconds.

Remove battery and try with AC adapter alone.
try with battery alone.
Remove HDD and see if at least BIOS is reachable consistently.
If there are 2 RAMs, try with one in the 1st slot. Try with 1 in 2nd slot too (some laptops won't work with 1st slot empty)

 

[MacNcheese76]

Can you remove the hard drive from the computer and insert it into an external enclosure? Plug it into another computer. You might be able to retrieve your files.

If you dont even see the BIOS, it sounds like a motherboard issue. But when you do boot past BIOS, then it sounds like a memory issue. Try running memtest on it if you can. But remove the hard drive and stop it from seeking and shutting down abruptly.

 

[barnesberic]

I tried the recommended combinations but nothing happens. Cannot run memtest at this point because the machine is pretty much a brick now. No BIOS. No activity at all. Even the fans have stopped working. Maybe a loose wire somewhere? I dunno. Like MacNcheese said, I'm just going to yank the hard drive and put it in a case for now. Closing the thread. Thanks anyway!