system will not boot past compaq logo screen. Can not access bios, will not boot from A: drive and will not boot with recovery disk. No beeps, no error messages.Any ideas? thanks in advance.

I had one I couldn'e get into and (I think) somebody said press and hold F10. ?? M2

thanks for info but it is not the keystroke. the a: drive light goes on then off, the hard drive spins up then ......nothing. just that red compaq logo. have tried dos boot disk, winme startup disk and recovery cd. nothing works. any help would be great.

this problem reminds me of a dilema i had 4 years ago after building my Asus k7V-T mainboard + Athlon 700 TBird CPU and WinME (as a matter of fact, its the PC i'm using NOW and the only PC i own. lol and afta 4 years, its still flying like a Thunderbird. Yep, nutten like an Asus/AMD combo). Sorry, back to my "dilema". Finished building the PC and turned the PC Box power on at the wall outlet. It started to boot. WHOA !! It read the floppy drive, fans spun, HDD wound up. And then everything STOPPED. Nutten on the monitor showing. Tried in vain to boot up by turning the wall outlet power switch off and on again. And again, And again, And again, And again......... The computer kept starting to boot but "died" each time. What to do ?? Phoned a friend the next day who was a bit cluey. He suggested (with a laugh) "to PUSH THE BUTTON ON THE PC BOX AFTER YOU SWITCH IT ON AT THE WALL OUTLET !!!" so i tried this.....turned the wall outlet switch ON. PC started to boot, then died. I THEN found the button on the PC case friend was talking about, and pushed it in. AMAZING !! PC didn't die on me.......booted right up into WinME Desktop. just thought i'd mention this. Still laugh about it today, 4 years on.

Could also be the CMOS battery on the system board has died (they last about four years or so). But you should be able to get past this, unless you have a USB keyboard. This failure can be cause by any of the disk drives, CD-Rom or diskette/120 drives failing and killing the IDE bus. You might have to try unplugging both cables from the system board and see if you can access the CMOS Setup with F10 or at least get an error message. Could also be a system board failure. This is a common one on older Compaq system boards. There are some capacitors that overheat and leak and damage the chip on the board that controls access to the IDE bus, preventing the diskdrive, CD-Rom and diskette/120 drive from working correctly. You get just a Compaq screen. But usually in this case, using the F10 when the cursor block first goes to the upper right of the screen, allows you to access the CMOS setup screens. If you can not use F10, make sure the keyboard is plugged in to the correct plug (not the mouse plug) and that it works on another system. If it is a USB keyboard, then try a keyboard with a PS/2 plug on it.