HP Pavillion single single blink code, won't boot

Hey. I have an HP Pavillion DV4 running Windows 7 that has some issues. About 8 months ago it stopped booting. The notebook would power up, with all the relevant LEDs lighting up, but wouldn't make it to the splash screen. It would stop, and the Caps Lock and Num Lock would go into a repeating single blink pattern. I messed around with it for a while, but didn't get anywhere, so I put it aside and forgot about it for a while. About a month ago I powered it back up, and it started no problem. It worked like this for about 2 weeks, then started doing the single blink/no boot thing again. Based on the codes available from HP, the single blink means CPU failure. After checking around online, I've read that a few people have replaced their processor in an effort to resolve this issue, and it didn't work. So, I was wondering if anybody had any ideas before I stripped this thing down and tried switching out the CPU. I've tried booting with only wall power, doing the RAM dance, pulling the CMOS and main battery overnight, but nothing has worked so far.

 

Greetings, jools1976.

Looks like you've tried everything I would have. My next steps might include:

1. Attempt to boot into BIOS (I know you've probably tried it, but I have to mention it).

2. Pull the hard drive and start the machine - any change in symptoms?

3. Attempt to boot to an optical disk if you can get the drive open (Windows disk, Linux, a recovery or drive diagnostics disk - any bootable disk just to see if you can get something).

Long shots. The fact that it started and ran for a while before crashing is a strange symptom - makes me think of heat, or even a cold solder joint, bent pin on a connector somewhere, loose cable, etc.

 

If you can boot to an optical, you might try running a good Memtest session.

 

Hey thanks for the reply. I must have forgot to put it in my initial post, but I've also tried booting it with the HDD and CD-ROM removed, same thing. Also, I tried booting with both a HDMI and VGA cable to external display, nothing. I can't get into the BIOS cause I'm not getting any kind of POST whatsoever... I have an external USB CD-ROM drive I can try.... But I have my doubts....

 

So I tried booting into Parted Magic (Linux based for those who haven't used it before...) with both an external CD-ROM drive and the onboard one, but neither worked. They both spooled up, but I still go the blink codes....

 

Good morning.

Well, that didn't work. Looks like you're going to have to weigh the pros and cons of moving forward with your troubleshooting.

I don't envy you - good luck.

 

Here are the blink codes for your Pavillion SV4
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...3366&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

It looks like you need a new CPU.

 

Yeah... I'm just a little leery about replacing the CPU, cause I read a few posts online about people with the same issue that changed out the CPU and mobo, and didn't resolve the problem...

 

So here's how I ended up sorting it out, a little barbaric, but it worked. I wrapped the laptop in a blanket and turned it on, leaving it like that until the thermal protection shut it down. On reboot it worked. It ended up dying again the next day, but I repeated the blanket trick again and it came back to life and has been working ever since. I'm assuming that there was a problem with one of the solder connections either on the GPU, or maybe the CPU (if it's SMT), and overheating it softened the connections enough that they repaired themselves.