On Tue, November 9, 2010 11:31 am, Luther Woodrum wrote: > Someone dropped off a toshiba qosmio laptop, which has a strange problem. > It supposedly was running vista, but it never gets anywhere near the boot > sequence. At first I suspected the hard drive, but it will not enter any > of the bios menus on f2, f8, f12, del, etc.. All it does is beep > whenever I press any key, and in the upper left corner of a black screen > there is a blinking underline for a cursor.
This sounds like the BIOS is corrupt and isn't loading correctly. If that's the case, unfortunately there's probably not a lot you can do unless the BIOS chip is removable and you have the necessary hardware to reflash it. On rare occasions you can find malware that will infect either the BIOS or the video BIOS, both of which can cause the computer to be unbootable thereafter until the BIOS is reflashed, so there are reasons besides hardware failure in which this can happen. ... > Has anyone seen this before? I haven't run into something quite this bad, but I have run into a situation where a computer would run just barely but not correctly because the BIOS was corrupt -- reflashing it fixed the issues I was having. However one of the places I worked at had a virus/trojan infect certain motherboards in the BIOS such that the computers wouldn't boot, and they were able to pull the BIOS chips and reflash them. I didn't personally see that operation, though, as it happened a few months before my arrival. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Dec 1 - IBM's Open Client Deployment Jan 5 - Building a Comunity Site with Drupal Feb 2 - Zimbra
