I have an HP ze1201 Notebook that seems to have died. It will not boot windows and when starting, hangs until it can not detect a bootable device. At this point, it takes me to the boot drive select screen where I can select Hard Drive, DVD-ROM, Floppy Disk, or LAN Boot. Under the BIOS, no hard drive or DVD-ROM drives are detected, even though they cannot be removed. I cannot boot from floppy as the floppy drive is an external USB floppy drive. I have a Router plugged into another computer and a DSL connection, but I am not sure how I would go about booting the PC this way. Ultimately the Hard Drive and DVD-ROM are (for unknown reasons) no longer recognized in the BIOS. The warrenty is expired and HP tech support are worthless. I would like to save the computer. What should I do next to re-habilitate it? HP notebooks suck, the batter is also completely dead after no less than 2 years of use. I can speculate the the IDE controller died on the board, but I am not sure how I would go about fixing this. What should I do? Avoid Intel Celeron CPUs, buy an AMD instead. Avoid Nokia, go Motorola instead.

Unless the information posted here is inaccurate (doubt it) your laptop appears to have modular components like the hard drive, floppy, battery and memory not sure with the optical drive though. ____________________________ The greatest risk is not taking one

Too bad you don't have an IBM, you could download the "hardware manaul" If it were me, I'd do this: (You are gonna hafta figure out how to take PART of it A--part) Find the reset button (if there is one) alternately, find and remove the cmos/bios battery If that doesn't work, figure out how to remove the hard drive. See if now the bios will detect the DVD/CDROM at least, and if it is bootable, see if you can boot from the CD. If that DOES work, then stick the hd back in and try again. I vote for either a corrupted bios or a bad hard drive. I would not immediately assume that the IDE controller is bad. (By the way, my thinkpad will boot from the external floppy.)

Yes, I thought about the possibility of a bad hard drive. Although the DVD-ROM is also not detected. What are the odds both would die at the same time? Anyways, I will remove the HD and see if I can boot Knoppix off the DVD-ROM. If that doesn't work I will call HP (again). Please take my advice, don't buy HP notebooks, the battery died after less than a year and now I face this problem. I build my own computers and never run into these problems on a good ASUS or Soyo board. Avoid Intel Celeron CPUs, buy an AMD instead. Avoid Nokia, go Motorola instead.

My HP Pavilion XH575 is dead (it seems from a software issue). Extensive tests with the HP e-diag tools show no hardware problems. chkdsk /f /r had fixed some problems in a pagefile.sys file and some application software I loaded. Problems (before software death) include: extremely slow PC as if something was using up all the resources. disappearance of windows explorer then shut down. Norton Internet Security 2004 scans ok at normal but in safe mode it always gets kicked out with some Kernel error cannot find \windows32\config\system file tried copying that file from windows\software through a recovery console from a setup disk now I am being asked for Administrator password and some error in software and registry. The blue screen goes by too fast to properly read it. Can XP be reinstalled without formatting HD?