Won't boot to anything but BIOS

[superdave1984]

This thing is odd. Crashed the other night with a disk read error. Try to boot to CD to do repair or recover, "Setup is checking hardware configuration..."
Then nothing. It's like the monitor is off. But it's not. The monitor is good, video card is good I think. I can get into BIOS and all looks fine in there. I have the IDE self test running now, but doubt if it will help. Any ideas? It's a Compaq EVO d310, 2.4 Ghz, 256 RAM. Business use only.

 

[Kharn]

Is this your rig or one of the ones you look after at work?

Is it just giving you the black screen? Did you update the drivers recently? played with the BIOS at all?

 

[superdave1984]

Nah this is a work PC. It crashed Friday night and I am just getting around to looking at it. haven't done anything to it but try to get it to boot. Not even a black screen really, more like no screen. Weird. But I can browse the BIOS screens fine and nothing looks out of the ordinary. Reset the CMOS hoping for something, but nope. I'm gonna run MEMTEST now and see what happens.

 

[Kharn]

Humm let me know what memtest says, we had a laptop at work that was like this but that was dropped down a set of stairs.

 

[superdave1984]

Humm let me know what memtest says, we had a laptop at work that was like this but that was dropped down a set of stairs.

And they expect it to sttill work? That's funny.

 

[Kharn]

Yhea some of the explanations I get are quite funny like the woman who thought that it was a good idea to wash the laptop in warm soapy water because it "Looked a little grubby" or the man who admitted after several hours on the phone to hitting a USB pen in with a hammer because it wouldn't fit in the way he wanted it to.

 

[atomic tofu]

how old is this thing?
looked inside?
could be a bad io card...if it's a real oldie

 

[superdave1984]

The only card that isn't onboard is a new NIC. The machine is about 3 years old. I've just never seen one that did this.

 

[cloud]

i had that happen to a desktop before, ended up having to delete the partition and reinstall windows

 

[superdave1984]

i had that happen to a desktop before, ended up having to delete the partition and reinstall windows

I would love to do that, but it never gets that far. I get the "Setup is checking your hardware configuration, then a blank screen.