3 posts shown.
I’m trying to jump into the BIOS because this HP screen keeps telling me to hit Esc to get there. I tried mashing F8, but nothing happened. Then the damn thing just died on me because the battery gave out. Thanks for the tip though—I'll give this a shot.
I can't. I already tried. It looks like I won't be able to do anything until Windows actually starts up, but mine won't even boot.
So I've got this old HP ProBook 4730s running Windows 7, using that basic Microsoft Essentials antivirus. Today, the thing flagged some threats, wiped them out, and asked me to run a full scan. Well, halfway through the scan, my battery completely died and the laptop just shut off. Now, when I plug it back in and try to boot, it won't even give me the option to "start Windows normally." It just flashes the HP logo, hits a black screen with that tiny blinking cursor in the corner, and then loops right back to the HP logo. It’s stuck in this endless loop. I checked the BIOS and ran a startup test—everything looks fine there—but when it gets to the hard drive check, it hits 10% and just stalls. I don't really know what I'm doing, so I'm being super specific here. Is my Windows installation just trashed, or did my hard drive actually die on me? I've got about 50 GB of photos on there that I am NOT losing.