HP Pavillion won't boot - please help!

[bkcincy]

I did something stupid which caused my HP Pavillion 8770C to die. My 12 yr old son
spilled something on the keyboard causing a few keys to stick so I decided
to swap it with a new keyboard. With the PC off, I inadvertantly plugged
the keyboard into the mouse ps2 socket (the mouse is connected USB) and then
turned it on. The display came up entirely blue. The PC went through the normal boot sequence i.e. floppy & CD drives read, HD spinning and activity light flickering and the display flashed off then on (blue) like it was trying to synch. At no time did any text, graphics or even the HP logo appear on screen. There were no beeps from the PC.

I turned it off and plugged the keyboard into the correct socket and
rebooted - same results. I went back to the old keyboard - same thing. I tried
it w/o keyboard and mouse - same thing. I tried another video card - same
thing. Different display - same thing. I tried to access the BIOS as it was
booting - couldn't. I called HP tech support. They walked me through a
power drain and had me remove then re-install the MB battery. As a result
it now won't even go through the boot sequence and the display is still
blue. Because the HP logo won't display (from BIOS) - I'm thinking it's
either the BIOS or P4 that's blown.

I'm at a loss as what to do next and would appreciate some ideas.

Regards,


Bill

 

[mechBgon]

Hi bkcincy, welcome to the Forums Well I was looking up the specs on that system, this sound about right? Specs for the 8770C

If you can find another ATX motherboard that uses the AMD Irongate (AMD 750/751) chipset, then chances are fairly good that Win98 could figure out the new board without requiring a full-blown reinstallation. Aha, here's an oldie: Asus K7M

The situation is complicated by the fact that your HP doesn't come with a real Win98 CD... it comes with an HP Recovery CD. If you had a real Win98 CD then it would be tempting to recommend just doing a full upgrade to an Asus A7N266-VM, an AthlonXP 1700+, and 256Mb of Crucial PC2100 DDR memory. That's just $135 right now, for a far nicer system... but you'd need Windows and I don't know if your HP CD would work or not.

You can get a Win2000 OEM CD for another $145, it's perfect for the A7N266-VM (unless you need to run pure DOS games or apps), and a new hard drive would make the system perform great... but we are approaching the $400 mark now, plus you would not have any of the software that came bundled with the HP since it's all tied up in the Recovery CD. See why the enthusiasts don't like pre-built systems now...?

Anyway, I hope those musings are helpful, or at least stimulate the right questions that lead to a solution. Holler if you have some more questions

 

[bkcincy]

You're suggesting the MB is blown? I upgraded to Win XP Home over a year ago. Will the Asus external connections matchup with the HP case? If not then I would just by a new case and MB and gut the HP.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: bkcincy
You're suggesting the MB is blown? I upgraded to Win XP Home over a year ago. Will the Asus external connections matchup with the HP case? If not then I would just by a new case and MB and gut the HP.

You can simply pull the terminals out of the HP connector block and plug them Dr. Frankenstein-style into the mobo's header (I did this with a HP that had a dead mobo at work), or you can get a new case/power supply if you like, yeah. If your case's wiring terminates in multiple individual plugs instead of one large one, then that's even better.