blue screen at boot (hp)

[ldrop]

hey,
i feel like a dummy. my mom-in-law has (had) a HP A335W pavilion desktop computer with only 256m of memory. for her birthday, i installed a single 1 gig stick into her computer. it ran fine for two days, then it went black. now, when she (i) boots it up it goes to a blue screen with f1=setup & f10=recovery. the computer is froze up and i cannot do anything but continuely restart the computer, no bias option at all. i have unpluged all components one at the time to no avail. there is no option to clear cmos. i have removed the battery overnight and reinstalled the following day, still same thing. i have replaced the memory stick with the original 256m, still no luck. when i turn in on, i get one beep, a pause, and then a trill of beeps that never stop. i did notice that one of the clamps on the CPU was broken, but the heat sink and fan seemed to be seated good. i really need to get this computer up and going to save face with my wife and mom-in-law.

[Troy]

From what you describe it sounds like it does not recognize the hard drive. Does it ever get to windows? Do you see the hard drive in bios?

[HayZee518]

you should have a recovery disk. the machine boots up from the hard drive first, then looks for the cd rom. put the cd in the reader and restart the machine. when you took out the mb battery you lost everything in the cmos. the bios is in the eprom [erasable programmable read only memory] so if you haven't flashed the bios the stuff should still be in there. when the machine starts go into setup. you'll need to reset stuff in cmos before anything will work.

[Java_Bob]

do like hayzee says set up your bios, make sure the drives start in the right order, operating sys is probably on C so made sure that starts first, good luck

[Max]

you're saying that F1=setup but when you press F1, nothing happens. Is that correct? That makes it pretty hard to reset your BIOS settings. If you can, try another keyboard and see what happens.

if you get all this sorted and your machine starts to boot again, it might be worthwhile checking your memory. there is a tool out there called memchecker (or something close to that). you copy it to a floppy and then boot from that. it will run a bunch of memory checks to see if you have any problems. it's a free tool.

you also mentioned a broken clamp. get that checked out. is there any chance that your CPU is not seated properly? I had a broken motherboard / CPU combo that I gave to a friend of mine years ago. Turns out it was fine, the CPU just wasn't seated properly.