PC... a victim of Foul Play? Whats this world coming to!

[rpearson]

I recieved a 1 month old Compaq Presario (SR1010NX), DOA ,and the person said it was battered by a former roommate who was pissed off due to eviction....

I recieved it DOA, and the CDROM drive tray was opened 1\4 of the way, and after removing the CDROM discovered that the tray was bent,gear mechanizms out of place, a clear indication that the CDROM drive was killed by blunt force.

1)Upon booting the machine I recieved the Compaq splash, then WinXP splash for a short moment then nothing...blank black screen or no video. Could not enter into any troubleshooting tools via keystroke, or could I enter BIOS at this time.
2)Thinking that the VGA cord had been yanked or VGA port dislodged from the mainboard by the suspect, I installed a generic vid PCI card to get some video. At this point I was able to see BIOS screen, able to boot and see my DATAADVISOR program floppy.I noticed that the BIOS VGA setting was set to use PCI video card so I changed that setting to Onboard, which it has,rebooted,and no video.Now I cant get video to see the BIOS screen to even change it back to PCI, to maybe get some video out of it.All other BIOS\CMOS vitals were normal.
3)Im not getting any response from the harddrive.I checked everything:jumpers,cabling. I tried it in the secondary controller, in a different machine...nothing.The disk can be seen as a slave or second drive through XP, HUH. MBR? Active partition DELETED? Maybe ill boot to a win98 disk and check the partitions.But I cant get video! Did they crack the MOBO?Ill keep sleuthin'away!

Suggestions? Have fun with this one.

 

[edfair]

Try pulling the battery or resetting the CMOS if you can find the jumper. Should allow you to get back to the onboard VGA and splash screens.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[firewolfrl]

Can you see the data on the HD in another computer????
Dying MB sounds about right...I have seen your problem you are having before. It was static electricity....and that problem may not be the case the computer sounds like it was tossed across a room....
if you can get the data of the hd get it and call the computer a loss

 

[MrGreenleaf]

What kind of mobo is it? Most of them have a default pci vga snoop function to detect if a pci video card is installed. My first attack would be to install the pci card with the onboard still enabled and see if the snoop function will detect the video. Second as said above, I would pull the cmos battery to set the motherboard back to its default settings. Once you get the machine back up with video, wait till the winxp splash screen and press f8 to go into safe mode. Select safemode with networking if you have a broadband connection and if it boots i would first go to

http://www.antivirus.com

and run a free online scan. Most often ive seen the black screen symptoms from xp it has been a corrupted or incompatible driver issue, sometimes due to virus infection, and often due to installation of hardware incompatible with service pack 1a, try these and see what you come up with. You can always resort to the repair utility from your install disk if that doesnt work. Good Luck!

 

[rpearson]

Thanks guys,

Yes you can view the harddrive as a slave on another box.

I will try your suggestions, thanks again.