Black screen with faint buzzing sound upon bootup; can't boot from CD

[LABachlr]

I'm working on a friend's Gateway Solo Pro 9300 laptop. I guess a friend of his had put a floppy in the drive and possibly installed something. Then, when my friend came back, the floppy was still in the drive. So, he took it out, booted up, got the flash screen, but then got a black screen with a faint whirly buzzing sound. It would not boot into windows.

So, I tried booting up into safe mode. It got to the point of loading the drivers, but then froze in the middle of it. I then tried booting from CD to format and reinstall XP, but it would not boot from CD. It would just go to the black screen and make the faint whirly buzzing sound again. I went into the BIOS to make sure that the boot sequence stated it would boot from CD first, which it did.

Does Gateway happen to have a key that you need to press to boot from CD like Toshiba?

What could possibly cause this? Which hardware might have gone bad?

 

[casper114]

Have you tried looking at the hard drive in another machine?

 

[LABachlr]

It recognizes it in the BIOS of the same machine. I have a Toshiba laptop that I can put it in. Should I try booting it up in the Toshiba?

 

[LABachlr]

The thing is, would a bad HD keep it from booting from CD? Could it be the mobo?

 

[casper114]

Man with the problems you are telling me I would start by removing everything except for the neccesities. Then work your way up part by part.

 

[LABachlr]

OK. Thanks.

 

[LABachlr]

I just tried using one of those 44 pin to 40 pin IDE adapters to see if the laptop HD could be read, and it would not get past the post screen. But I then tried the same adapter with my laptop's hard drive, which definitely works, and it said that it failed. Are you supposed to use jumpers on the laptop HD when you hook it up to a desktop via that adapter? It was the Secondary Master.

I then tried booting up the laptop in question with my HD, and it said that it could not find the OS. I tried to boot from CD, and it still would eventually boot from the HD, and give the same "could not find OS" message. But I think I remember having problems with the CD-ROM the last time I had to reformat his drive. Is there another way to install the OS onto a laptop HD? But again, even a HD that definitely worked gave the message of no OS found. So, I'm not sure what that is about.

Any ideas?