My daughter has a HP Pavillion Model a6500f 64 bit that is running Vista Home Premium. It has 4 gigs of ram, a 500 gig hard drive, and a dual core processor.

The computer ran fine until tonight. When she turns it on the keyboard is recognized but a blue splash screen for HP comes up that asks to click on esc to go into bios, F10 for setup, etc.

It won't go any further. There appears to be a yellow (or amber) light that lights up right behind the power swith (which does light up.) I can hear the fan is running and the mouse shows that it has power too.

If I press esc, a message comes up that it is entering setup but never does. It just sits there.

I would sure appreciate it if somebody could give me an idea what I might try to do to help her get her computer going again.

Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions.

Solved the problem myself. Opened the tower and changed the port that the SATA drive cable connected to. At least after doing that and restarting the computer I was able to get into BIOS. Showed no hard drive as being recognized. Went to HP's site and found that Seatgate had a problem with some of the hard drives (500, 700, etc.) After calling a technician with HP it was decided that the hard drive had failed (no indication of it failing-it just stopped!!!)

HP is sending a new hard drive and a recovery disk (the recovery partition was on the hard drive that failed. No cost. There was still 50 days left on the warranty.

I guess we were LUCKY!

Thanks for looking at my computer problem.

Glad you got it covered under warranty