Computer no workie anymore
 

So I'm working on the computer late at night, leave to go pick up some stuff, and return to find it broken. The problem I'm having is described here.

I boot up the computer and it shows the quick startup screen with an F1 option for Setup or F10 option for System Recovery. If nothing is pressed, it goes to the black screen with a blinking cursor. If F1 is press for setup, it saying "Starting setup.." or something like that but ends up just going to an empty black screen. Pressing F10 does nothing.

Any ideas? I'm going to start searching around any info but I'll take any help I can get.

"Compaq Desktop PCs"



That's your problem right there. I fixed my old Crashpaq with a God damned sledgehammer. I use an E-Machine now.

try resetting your CMOS. i have very little experience with oem's like that, sry. follow the instructions given by hp/compaq ftw.

Ok, well I was fairly sure that it was a problem with the hard drive so I pulled it out of the computer and set it up as a slave on my working computer to see if I could save some of the data. The good thing is that it worked great and I was able to get all of the data. The bad news is that I now don't have even the slightest idea of what is wrong with the other computer.

My next guess is that it is some type of problem with the mother board but that is just my undeducated guess. Anyone more familar with this have any ideas on where the problem is possibly located? I'd like to salvage as much of this comp as possible.

sounds like a software(boot.cfg) problem to me

You have to be a little gutsy to try this on your own, but you can typically reset the CMOS on an OEM PC (like Compaq) just like you could with a bulit computer. Look on the motherboard for a round, flat, silver battery. Near that, look around for a set of three pins right in a row with a jumper on two of the three. If you can find that, it's probably your CMOS reset.

With the power unplugged, take the jumper off of the two pins and put it back on the center pin and the pin that wasn't used before. In other words, if the jumper was around 1-2 to start with, put it back around 2-3. Leave it there for around 15 seconds, then put it back on 1-2 and try to boot your computer again.

With any luck, that will zap all of your settings and get it to at least boot back into setup.

Hope this helps! If not, let me know specifically what your PC's model is, and I'll see what I can do.

Also, a question: what happens if you try to start the PC with no hard drive?