black screen of death and corrupt bios

[Juno1029]

I've had my hp for a couple of years now and have been pretty happy with it besides my current problem. Recently i updated windows 10. I was at my school and after the update, the laptop booted up and i saved a document I was working on. after a long drive home, i was ready to start working on homework but my laptop was dead. After plugging it in and booting up, nothing happened. The caps lock button was flashing 3 times slowly and twice rapidly which i found to mean a hardware/ motherboard failure. After talking to many people over the phone, I was eventually told that the issue was surely a corrupt BIOS. the person i spoke to told me that it could be fixed by removing the CMOS battery. After hours of staring at the motherboard blankly, I concluded that it doesn't have a CMOS battery but rather a capacitor or something. I have tried to hold the power button for almost 15 minutes with the battery out in hopes of draining said capacitor and still nothing. I've also tried to reinstall windows to see if i get any results but because i can't even get to the bios recovery menu (holding win key with b or v) and trying to restore the bios with a flash drive does not work. 

   Is there another key combination i could use to get it to read the USB? I need my laptop for school and have a TON of unreplaceable documents and project files. Because the laptop is out of warranty as well i can't send it in and can't afford a 600 dollar motherboard replacement which is almost the same price as the laptop const in the first place. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all.

[MadHat]

Am very sorry about your loss man. If you need your work immediately, pull out the SSD and work from another computer if you can get one using an SSD adapter. HP seems to have problems with the 8th gen processors from intel currently.

Your BIOS must have gotten boggled by that update. 

But for now, use another computer. I understand how you fee. These computers just look good, feel good to use letting go of them is just too hard. 

Am saving up to cross to either Dell or Lenovo.

[Lil_Boy_Blue · Accepted solution]

Hi

Try to re-seat the RAM, perhaps VERY CAREFULLY clean the contacts and re-fit.

If in doubt please ask.

[Juno1029]

Thanks, thanks for replying, I've been dealing with this for 2 days now but i finally found a solution. i was running my SSD in my sister's laptop (same one) and i was doing some more troubleshooting. it looks like one of the ram slots is dead, one of the first things i thought i tried. i put her laptop's memory in mine and it didn't help. after removing every connection from my motherboard, i installed a single ram in one of them and it booted. it comes with 2 8gig sticks so it's not a huge loss but just kind of annoying. i have some deoxidizer ill try on the slot tomorrow but the lack of boot seems to indicate it is the CPU's mem management or something. 

I'm glad i got it working but I'm still pretty pissed about all this. in the first couple of months i had thins thing, the screen stopped working. i work at a screen repair shop and have a bunch of stuff there to find broken LCDs for warranties and stuff like that. the LCD was good but when i send it in they said it was physically damaged, which it wasn't. i got that working after a bit as well. secondly, when i got it back from hp the frame was all bent up, it looked like they had trouble figuring out how to open it up. 

thanks one more time for the help, and sorry for the long-ass message its 5 am where i am and i need some sleep. 

[Juno1029]

thanks, one of the first things i tried. it turned out to be a bad ram slot.