First of all I want to thank everyone for checking out my thread and especially to those who post help here. Here's my problem. I have a Compaq Presario 7xx laptop that I built from parts. It won't boot past the Compaq screen, it just goes to a black screen with a cursor in the upper left corner. The light on the keyboard shows that the HD is working, but nothing ever happens. If I put the HD from my working 700 in, it does the same but says 'operating system not found'. I used my restore disks to restore the first drive in the good computer so I know it works, but the computer fails to see it or something. This is my second MB in this computer. The first one did the same thing. Starting to think it's not the MB! Could it be the little board that goes from the MB to the battery/HD? Is this a software problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am pretty dumb when it comes to computers. I just have the ability to put things together like a 3D puzzle.
Compaq presario 700 won't boot. Please help the newbie!
- Thread starter restoguy
- Start date
Have I insulted the intelligence of the members here, or said something wrong? I can't imagine that this is something that no one knows anything about. I'm sorry if it seems really trivial, but like I said, I can take stuff apart and put it together fine. I just don't know what to do after that if it doesn't work. Thanks again for any help.
The drive that I'm trying to put in it is used. I swapped that drive into my other machine and used my restore disks to reformat it. It was originally in a Mac. It worked fine in my 'good' machine. But the 'bad' machine won't work with the Mac HD or the HD from the 'good' machine. I suspect the MB is bad, but it's the 2nd one and it boots to the Compaq screen, which the other didn't. I am just wondering if there might be some other problem that I'm not aware of here. (Like last time. I rebuilt an IBM and after buying 3 MB's I found out that they weren't grounding good enough. Fixed that and then it worked fine! Who knew?) Yeah, I'm a compuretard but I'm learning.....
Hairy_Lee
VIP Member
im guessing your system has two sets of cables for your drives, the one thats currently in your hard drive and the one that goes to your cd-rom.
try swapping cables of your cd-rom drive and hard drive and then redetect them in your bios and see if it boots.
if you have a problem with your cd-rom you know its the motherboard
try swapping cables of your cd-rom drive and hard drive and then redetect them in your bios and see if it boots.
if you have a problem with your cd-rom you know its the motherboard
This is on a laptop, so my ROM drive slides into it's connector on the MB. The battery and HD slide into a little circuit board that plugs into the MB. I'm thinking about trying that circuit board from my 'good' maching in the 'bad' one. If that doesn't fix it, I think it must be the MB not properly operating the HD. That would eliminate almost everything in the chain but the MB. What do you think?