I'm not certain if I've got a software or firmware problem, but either way it's vexing. I'm using a Compaq Presario 1700T laptop. When I push the on/off button, one of three things will happen: 1. The hard drive starts spinning but stops after about 15-20 seconds and the screen remains blank. No combination of keys gets the computer going. 2. The hard drive starts spinning, the screen comes on with the Compaq logo, and then the hard drive stops after 15-20 seconds. Again, no combination of keys gets the computer going. 3. The hard drive starts spinning, the screen comes on with the Compaq logo and a small white square in the upper righthand corner, and the machine proceeds to boot normally. If I've experienced the other situations, I get a message the previous boots were incomplete and to push F1.

Sounds like a disk drive starting to have problems. Get it started and then run SCANDISK in Standard mode once to check the file system pointers. When done, start SCANDISK again and select the Thorough mode. Let it run, will take many hours if the drive is very big. If you have a diskette drive on the system, try to boot from a Windows ME startup diskette. (Make one in Add/Remove Programs, Startup Disk tab.) From the A:\ prompt, enter SCANDISK C: and try doing a full scan of the disk drive from the DOS version of SCANDISK. ScanDisk might be able to fix the problem if ran several times. But once started, try to backup all your critical data.

Thank you for your suggestions, Jack. I finally got the machine too boot and from WinME, SCANDISK automatically started in standard mode... During the process however, the machine shuts down on its own and behaves in one of the ways listed (1-3) above.

Was able to boot from a bootdisk and ran "A:\ SCANDISK C:" Everything checked out OK, but the machine froze and stopped responding 5 minutes into the surface scan... Any suggestions?