Laptop Issue at Startup - horrible noise!

Hey guys,

My brother's HP laptop seems to have died. He can't get it to start up - if he presses the power button, it appears to boot and then a blank screen comes up (the screen is on, but just black). A loud whirring noise can be heard and he just has to hold the power button in and turn it off. He believes that he had a few trojans and viruses before this occurred - how could these be linked?

He is Dundee and I am in Liverpool so am unable to help physically - any ideas? Overheating? Failed hard drive?

matt

In reply to a post by matthewlowry88:

it appears to boot and then a blank screen comes up (the screen is on, but just black).

For how long? What happens if you leave it?

Once had HP laptop that took over 10 mins just to POST (Power-On Self-Test); diagnosed as M/Board failure and replaced

If left it just sits there, no action whatsoever! Odd I know. It seems to be at the POST stage that this happens (is that before the Windows or Microsoft logo appears on the screen?).

matt

Can you get into the BIOS?

Can he get into BIOS? See if he can download and burn a (Linux) live CD. If he can boot from that it will point to the hard drive being faulty.

Power distribution board.

I don't know whether the machine in question has a standard serial port or not, but when my old Dell laptop wouldn't start, I hooked it to a normal PC with a Null Modem cable and found it gave a POST status dump which pointed to faulty memory. I used Hyper Terminal in Win98, set to Auto Sense the bit-rate and would guess that later OS's probably have something similar. If he's got enough stuff hanging about without buying anything, it might be worth a try.
Richard.