Son of a....

Hello everyone, me again with the same crashing compy...but I think it might have tried to bite the big one this time. First, my specs:

HP XL768 base compy.
AMD 900 MHz T-Bird
Asus K7M Mobo
Power supply works (unsure of #'s)
Creative SB Live! LS 5.1
GeCube Radeon (ATI) 9200 SE 128 MB GameBuster (drivers are crap)
Lan card (Linksys I think)
A couple of loud whining fans
Windows XP Pro
Mozilla Firefox (Yeah Baby!)
CD-R (mid-grade HP)
CD/DVD
floppy drive
Saitek P2500 Gamepad
etc.

What happened: Just bought Need for Speed Underground 2 (Wal-mart brought it down to $30), was playing for about an hour without a problem (a bit slow, of course), then the screen went blank and the monitor shut off (no data powersaver) and an ear-piercing high-pitched note rang through the speakers. So I gave the computer a hard-shutdown, waited 30 minutes (food), and attempted to reboot. Now all I get is the HP "Invent" boot screen and nothing else. the processor light is on constantly, and the system will not read a floppy disk. I have a bootable disk, but the system doesn't even turn the disk drive. :eek2:

I would go to the recovery console if I could get to it...but all I get is the HP splash screen.

I think I might have fried something, I'm going to open the case in a bit to see if I can find any physical damage. any help would be great! thanks everyone!

Go into the bios and see if the drive is detected and if not then your drive may have went however it wouldn't be the first time I have seen this and you reset the jumper to CS or master and it will detect the drive again and start. More then likely the floppy is not being detected because it's not in the start up sequence as I have also seen with HP and the light that is always on is either your power or hard disk light as I don't believe I have ever seen a processor light. The noise I'm not sure about.

See if the drive is detected and if it is set the boot seqence to start with the floppy first then try the floppy. If it isn't detected change the jumper settings to master or CS just to see if it will kick it in gear again.

I'd love to get into the bios...if I could. the keyboard/mouse/etc. is completely non-responsive. all I get is the blue "HP INVENT" splash screen. no recovery console, no scrolling of startup lists, nada. just the blue screen smiling at me. My floppy drive does not have a master/slave/CS selector. it's on its own seperate IDE cable. the light I was talking about was the hard disk light...the light that flickers when the computer "thinks." tried a bootable disk, nothing. tried pulling the battery from the Mobo and let it sit for 10 minutes, same thing. tried to boot without battery, same thing. I don't see any physical damage to the cards, all heatsinks are good, fans work, thermal paste is still good and gooey... but I'm completely lost. I worked for Dell long enough to know better than to buy one and think that I could upgrade it, so I bought this HP off Ebay for cheap and made it a project. I'm on a borrowed compy for the time being, and would like to get my compy up and going ASAP.

When I boot my compy, I can hear the hard disk start to turn, but nothing starts up. I can hear the CD-rom drives spin but nothing, either. should I create a bootable CD? I'll continue tearing down the hardware and looking over it to see if it is a physical damage problem. Hopefully my mobo didn't fry, I don't exactly have the fundage for a new one. If its RAM thats the problem, I have an extra chip that I can swap out no problem. Oh well. I'll do what I can. I would still like more insight if anyone knows anything that would help...or anything that would brighten the mood of a gamer without his console.

btw - thanks Kodiak for the advice.:thumbs:

Kodiak, if you were in Louisiana, I'd treat you to a frosty cold beverage. I tinkered around with the jumpers and a magnifying glass, disconnected everything, reconnected everything one-by-one, and the thing finally posted! woot! Anywho, I got the sytem to boot through the bootable disk, and it's running the memory test now. just thought I would update. Hopefully I'm not celebrating too soon, but hey, progress is progress!:drink:

With an HP you won't see the scrolling of the start up seqence if it is set to default which it will set itself to if you pull the battery out. You are hitting F1 or F2 are you not to get into the bios? Forgive me if that was a stupid question. You could try a bootable cd because if your bios is set to default it will start with the cd first on the HP I believe. Although it should give you some sort of disk error if the board was getting to the point of handing it off to your hard disk.

:thumbs2: it's alive! my compy is up and running again, let the memory diagnostic run for about 26 passes, failed one test, plugged in another stick, ran another 30 passes, passed all....rebooted...and here I am!

and I'm back to NFSU2. thanks for the help and suggestions!

Yeah I have seen it before and have done the same thing twice on a HP. You may end up having to do it again and again and I'm not sure what cuases it. Your welcome and I'm located in Orgeon myself. Good to hear I can help and its up and running.

just to recap for anyone that had a similar problem - I recently had more problems with the same system, and it seems that my Kingston RAM chip had two gold connections that FELL OFF...so that was crashing the computer more often and wreaking havoc.

Anywho, replaced the chip and now I'm only having problems with overheating...but I have a box fan that helps with that. Lata! back to racing...look for me on NFSU2 Online Racing as Sockhatguy