Pavilion 533w partial boot/ shutdown

[PC-Dawg]

i'm looking at a friends pc, it was working fine two weeks ago when i "cleaned" it up for him- disk clean up, defrag, etc... now it it won't boot up. it comes on, goes through some of the boot sequence then shuts down. no apparent reason. the led light on the front is yellow too after it shuts down. i'm about to pull the ram one at a time and switch around as a test but if anyone has a suggestion i would love to hear it. thanks.

[PC-Dawg]

 more info:

ok, i tried pci video card, ram swap, diff hard drive, always same result. pc comes on and goes thru boot seq. and goes to "windows failed to load last time" and may stay on for a while but as soon as i select an option (even safe mode) it will shut down. same result going through the bios setup.

the strange part to me is this;

the monitor, cpu and case fans, all shut down. however, the hard drive is still running, the power supply fan is still on w/ power at the plugs, and the led light below the power button turns yellow. bad mo-bo or cpu? both?

[RasterBlaster]

To me, it sounds like an important operating system file was deleted or replaced.

You should be able to boot to HP Ssytem Recovery and use Microsoft System Restore to go back to a time when it was working properly. If not, just use the HP SYstem Recovery to reinstall the OS. You'll need to reinstall most of you programs to re-hook the registry values, but it'll also get rid of most viruses that might be sitting in there.

Just make sure you don't do a full system recovery - that wipes out the entire hard drive data and starts over.

[PC-Dawg]

thanx for the reply. i'll look into that. there is the possibility that the other hdd i tried was bad as well. i thought that it would at least react differently. it was in a compaq presario that i hadn't even hooked up yet because the memory was missing when i got it.

thnx again.

[PC-Dawg · Accepted solution]

It appears we may be both correct. The HDD had all kinds of errors and check disk said it repaired them all, however, the darn thing still won't boot up. Not in any mode. The check disk was performed using another pc, and the HDD from that one won't boot up the sick pc either. Not even a post beep code and even if it comes on long enough to get to the "previous attempt to open windows failed..." screen or the BIOS it won't stay on long enough to do anything. I am giving up on this one. He'll just have to take it to someone w/ more training, and time, lol. Thanks for the help.