Q: I have a compaq presario v3000 that simply won't start. I press the on button and the top row of lights (on switch light, vloume control, mute and DVD player light) comes on but thats it. Occasionally i hear some faint 'boot sounds' from inside but thats it.
Please help!



A: The very first thing I would do is remove the laptop hard drive HDD and make a backup copy using another system. I use the freeware programs DriveImageXML or xxclone. You will need either a connector adapter to connect to the internal IDE cable of the host computer, or and USB2IDE+SATA adapter (this lets you connect either an IDE or SATA (3.5" or 2.5") disk drive to a USB port on a host computer.

A basic diagnostic is if you try to make a backup image and you can't even read the laptop HDD, then you know you've got a bad HDD or corrupted HDD data.

The second reason for making the backup is that in case during diagnosing the problem you accidently cause even more problems. This way, you have a way to at least get back to your current disk state if something goes wrong. This will be critical if you have no installation or recovery disks/media to restore your system if the HDD gets corrupted during diagnostics. Unfortunately, not all retailers provide a good set of recovery media.

The backup will also be very important if on the HDD you have unique and important personal data that have not been yet backed-up.
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Also, with the HDD removed, the POST (power-on self-test) may respond differently and you may be able to get fart