Compaq Presario Won't Boot

My mother has my old Compaq Presario. Not sure when I got it, but it was during the time Vista was new. Anyways, my brother was on it the other day and when he left I went to shut it down, it said it had to do a Windows update, and it was installing 1 of 12 updates. About an hour later I checked and it was installing 1 of 7 updates. It stuck on 1 of 7 for over 4 hours, so I assumed it froze so I just shut it off and turned it back on see if it would finish, but now it only shows the Compaq logo screen and nothing else. Once it starts you can hear the fan, and then it will stop. Nothing else happens. It says to press esc or F10 for boot options, but pressing those does nothing at all. Someone said the hard drive might have went out, but not sure. I don't know much about this stuff. Any advice?

 

A typical EIDE or SATA hard drive has a reliable lifespan of about 6 years under normal (typical home computer) use, so it wouldn't be at all surprising if the hard drive is toast. But then again.... do you have any sort of boot disk that you can use to at least get you to a command prompt? A recovery disk, repair disk, installation disk, rescue disk, anything at all?

 

I had the recovery disc when I first got it, but since she's taken it over, she has no idea where she put them, and she's moved 3 times so I wouldn't be surprised if she trashed them by accident.

I do have another notebook that is mine, but I recently bought a new one. If the hard drives are both SATA, could I switch them and see if it works, or would that not matter?

 

It's possible that the hard drive went out, but there's nothing here to suggest that's connected to the Windows updates.

If it boots to the Compaq logo, then you should likely be able to boot to the BIOS/UEFI. From there you could see if the old hard drive is still listed as a boot device and even being detected.

 

Honestly, I don't know. You likely have 2 different motherboards, different BIOS, different controllers. At the very least you'd need to find out whether your mom's hard drive is compatible with your motherboard/controller and if so you'd need to obtain the proper firmware for that specific hard drive. If we were dealing with EIDE hard drives you could just slave her hard drive to yours but it's different with SATA drives. Sorry, I'm simply not geeky enough to walk you through this one. The true forum geeks are typically all over a thread like this. Must be the holidays keeping them busy. Just be patient and if you don't get any bites in the next couple days you might want to wait for the new year to post your question again in a new thread. I'll do some research on the matter and will post here if I figure out anything.

 

It says to press esc for boot options. From there is says:

CPU - 1 processor detected, core per processor 2
Genuine Intel R CPU T208 @ 1.73ghz
1024m system ram passed
1024k cache sram passed
system bios shadowed
video bios shadowed
atapi cd-rom hlp v-a dd81

Then it says press F10 to enter set up and when you press that it locks up again and doesn't change screens. If you press F10 from the start up logo and it says please wait at the bottom and does nothing else.

 

@DLBell

Assuming those are the results when you're using the HDD in the old Compaq, as you'll notice there's no HDD listed there. There's the laptop's optical drive, but that's not what we're looking for. Based on your description it sounds like you're not looking at these options from within BIOS though.

Easy options I'd suggest now are along the lines of what rustysavage suggested. If you had an external hard drive enclosure to mount the drive via USB or a desktop and plugged the problematic drive in with a spare SATA cable after booting you could try to access it that way.

I'm not certain the drive is entirely dead yet, but I'd ask your mother what's most important from the drive, assuming anything can be recovered.

 

Yeah, that wasn't from the BIOS. That's just all that does pop up when hitting either of the two bottoms it says to hit. I've been in the BIOS before, but when I press F10 to get to it now, it just says "please wait" at the bottom and never loads the BIOS... just stays there. Mother doesn't have anything on the HDD she cares about. She just uses it for emails and Facebook. She doesn't really know how to do anything else. Lol

I can try getting an external HDD, had one in the past that I actually used on that notebook. It's been long since gone though.

 

I didn't mean an external HDD, but an external HDD enclosure. Sometimes you can mount the drive via USB to access some of the files using software like Recuva. That said, if she doesn't care about the files on the drive at all, it may not be worth the $10-$20 USD to buy one.

If it was me I'd just write the drive off as dead and spend $50 USD to get her a new one. Your call. Give it another day or two to see if anyone else chimes in with a better idea though.

 

I agree completely with Rainman. I just checked Amazon.com and you can buy a 1TB WD Blue HDD for a little more than $50. WD Blue 160 GB for $18. If your mom is anything like mine (plays Solitaire, surf the web, Facebook) then she would probably get along just fine with a 160 GB HDD. Also, the holidays are upon us so I wouldn't expect to get many more bites on this thread until after the new year.

 

I'm not sure the HD has problems, but that might be one thing.

As has been suggested previously, you could buy a suitable external USB enclosure (caddy) for the disk (probably a SATA one), remove the disk from the Presario and put it in the enclosure, and use your notebook to examine the disk and transfer files if you can/wish to. You can also test the disk to verify whether it has any problems.

You definitely should enter the BIOS at boot up usually by repeatedly pressing the F8 key (sometimes it varies, on my Presario it's F2 IIRC) and see whether the hard disk shows up there.

If the hard disk is (relatively) undamaged but the OS is corrupted you might try a system recovery to restore the machine to the factory state (if you don't mind losing the data), or to clone the disk to a new one and carry out said system recovery from the recovery partition.

I have been using an 80GB disk for 10 or 13 (can't remember when I got the PC !) years now and it's never had any indication of disk problems [other problems, yes]

Dumb_Question
26.December.2013
Compaq Presario S5160UK DT261A under XP/SP3
Processor - Celeron 2.7 GHz
Motherboard - MSI MS-6577 v2.1
RAM - 1GB + 512MB (1GB +1GB max) DDR PC2700
PSU - Octigen 300W model 10270PSOTG ('upgraded' from original Bestec 250W PSU [in 2011?])
Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics card in AGP slot.

 

You're a lucky man because that is way, WAY off the chart. See this interesting article:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for

 

It's an interesting article, a pity they don't have data going back more than 4 years.

I reckon that making the same assumptions about the failure rate beyond 4 years, almost 30% of drives (which are continuously spinning - no down time or power saving), if they survive the first 3 years, would make it to 13 years. (please check this someone !)

Manufacturers must have some data on this, because they warranties for specific periods, and they are sure not to lose on those by replacing more disks than is included in the price. If they could offer a longer warranty they would because it means they could steal a march on competitors. Using this argument, most manufacturers' disks are equally reliable (does higher price mean a premium for quality, or just an additional cost to cover the cost of a higher in-guarantee failure rate ?)

Manufacturers also sometimes quote MTBF numbers (for some products, this is way beyond the time has even existed, so I wonder how they measure them ?)

Dumb_Question
11.January.2014

 

We purchase from national distrib's and I'm told that so-called warranty times are indicators of "shelf availability", not a comment about functional longevity.

"How long do we have to maintain these units on shelves?" is the concern because items on shelves can be taxable inventory. The manufacturer will maintain a small inventory, but they'll sign contracts with global distributors and they'll agree to maintain shelf-inventory, agree to pay taxes and even cross-ship to locations beyond territories. The price of Enterprise Drives vs. Consumer Drives isn't so much a function of materials, then, but rather "lengthier times of promised storage, the additional taxable costs for that storage, and the cost of future shipping".

I believe these formulas are closely related to voodoo, black magic and politicians' historic moral compasses. (Big Foot, Yeti, Loch Ness sightings need not apply.)

That said, I've got a working Compaq 386/33 with three 300Mb MFM drives - the predecessors to IDEs. These are full-height drives stored in external cabinets the size of boot-boxes, with attaching cables about the size of broom-handles. 16Mb RAM, QEMM, DOS 6.22. The original units sold for $27,000, and favorably competed against mini-computers in the $300,000 price range. I keep one 'alive' for some future museum and to remind myself of the joys of line-command tinkerings. "Oh boy! 619k of Available RAM - I wonder if I can load one more Postscript Font as a TSR?!!"

 

:confused

Dumb_Question
11.January.2014

 

I've run into ChristineBCW in a number of threads and he/she is clearly either trolling or frankly psychotic.