Older Presario V2410 cannot get BIOS/Setup - PXE 2.0 loop

[zapp22]

Older Presario V201CL cannot get BIOS/Setup - PXE 2.0 loop

everytime I think "I've seen it all", I haven't. This older Turion-based Presario V2000 series was working fine... Last night it was ok - I could get into setup, had OS loaded, was looking for the right graphics driver, finally went to sleep and turned off the unit. Came in this morning, turned it on, and it goes immediately to LAN-boot PXE 2.0 "media test failure" and cannot get it out of that loop. Hit F10 [compaq's setup key] - ignored. F2... F12, pulled battery, drained caps, tried again, pulled HD, nothing.
won't boot CD/DVD, or anything else.

anyone seen this? I see tons of threads on the issue but they all end with "go to bios and change......". I can't.

 

[TVeblen]

You have done everything I would do.
You know you need to reset the BIOS to defaults to get the setting off of "Boot PXE (Network)".

You may need to pull it apart and remove the 3v battery from the motherboard to do this.

Some units have a reset button of sorts on the motherboard, some do not. Some have a small hole through the bottom of the case that you can use a bent paperclip to reach through and hit the button.

 

[zapp22]

yep, and it turned into a nightmare. trying to flip that battery out unseated the entire socket .... i do not possess either cold solder tools or expertise but managed somehow to get it back into contact.
in the process, something upset either the display harness or the vid card.... this model has a radeon someting-other mini vid card. I've looked all over and cannot see what did the deed.... I now have a pink display
just as bizarre... when after hours I got the thing to boot anything other than 'PXE', it came first/foremost with "press __ to RESUME" or F10 for setup..... I forget which key it was, but are you kiddin' me? RESUME??????? I thought power-kill would stop the resume function on just about every notebook made, but not this one. [that, by the way, was sans drives.... no hddd installed, no dvd, no battery pack, no nothin'].
sure enough, when I killed the boot from nic and other things, put the hdd back in, it "resumed"

nightmare, nightmare, nightmare.

 

[TVeblen]

That is quite bizarre. It makes me wonder if the BIOS chip is bad. Or the motherboard in general.