Novice2000
New Member
A friend of mine has an HP mini laptop. It came with Vista, and he hates Vista. So he plugged an external usb cd player to it so he could install XP on it. The installation disk started to do a full format on the hard drive. He decided that he did not want to wait for the full format. So he powered down the computer, right in the middle of the format, so he could start over again and do a quick format. This was a big mistake, because now it won't boot. The only thing it does is to show the HP logo and that's it. It won't even let you get into the bios setup. And it won't boot off the cd player anymore so he can try the XP installation again.
He figured that he somehow corrupted the bios, so he flashed the bios off of a thumbdrive that he downloaded the file onto for doing this. This worked, it installed the new bios, but that still hasn't done any good. It still won't boot off of the cd and it still won't even let you get into the setup. If he leaves the thumbdrive plugged in to the usb port, after playing around with it, he will be able to get into the bios setup, only with the thumbdrive plugged in. But this seems like it doesn't do any good anyway, because he looked in everything and there really isn't anything he can change to make this work.
Does anyone know what happened and how this could be fixed? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
He figured that he somehow corrupted the bios, so he flashed the bios off of a thumbdrive that he downloaded the file onto for doing this. This worked, it installed the new bios, but that still hasn't done any good. It still won't boot off of the cd and it still won't even let you get into the setup. If he leaves the thumbdrive plugged in to the usb port, after playing around with it, he will be able to get into the bios setup, only with the thumbdrive plugged in. But this seems like it doesn't do any good anyway, because he looked in everything and there really isn't anything he can change to make this work.
Does anyone know what happened and how this could be fixed? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.