BleepingComputer.com: Mysterious Laptop Death - Only Blinking Cursor Remains

Yesterday my computer - a Sony Vaio PCG-V505AP - was working fine all day, as always. At about sevenish I turned it off, but left it plugged in. When I came back to it at 9.30 it was dead. It's a mystery: I haven't dropped it, spilled anything on it, upgraded the hardware or even installed any new software.

When I press the power button, the power light turns on and the hard-drive indicator briefly flashes. Then the Sony logo is displayed, just as it used to. But then the PC just sits there with a white cursor blinking in the top left-hand corner of a black screen. The fan is on, as is the power light, but there's no hard-drive activity at all.

Here's what I've tried:

If I press ctrl-alt-delete it restarts and just does the same thing.

If I repeatedly press keys, it eventually makes a beep for every keypress. Otherwise it is silent.

I cured a previous death (in which it didn't power up at all) about a year and a half ago by opening up the case and cleaning it - the fan had got quite bunged up with dust. I tried doing the same thing this time but it had no effect at all.

The hard drive works fine when I put it in a different computer.

I removed the CPU and tried starting the machine. This time it showed the power-up light but then did nothing at all.

I have absolutely no idea what the problem could be. It doesn't seem to be the CPU, the power or the hard drive. Could it be the motherboard? I thought PCs just did nothing at all if the motherboard blew up.

Can anyone suggest a way of reviving it? I bought it second hand about two years ago, and I was just thinking to myself the other day that it's one of the best things I've ever bought.


Thanks,


Chris

Will it boot to a CD?

I think it would. Oddly enough I've just found that the laptop will boot from my old hard drive but not from the one I've been using since February (a Seagate Momentus 5400 160GB). The Seagate works as an external drive (in a USB casing) but I can't boot from it.

Do you think the boot files on the Seagate have got corrupted? If so, what's the best thing to do about it?

Thanks a lot,

Chris

It's me again. I've tried using the recovery console, but it doesn't find any windows installations to log on to. If I use the 'dir' command at the C: prompt, I get the message, 'An error occurred during directory enumeration.'

I had a "Bob's brand" hard drive the kids gave me for father's day and it lasted only 4 months. The hard drive was damaged Where windows was loaded. The rest of the drive was fine. Point being you may have had a physical failure of the drive in the sectors containing Windows, and the rest of the drive for now, is OK. http://www.hdtune.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">HDTune hard drive utility is a recommended utility in out Freeware library, and should detect a failed sector on your drive.