[kenflyken]

I have a HP dv6501tu (C2D 7200 2.0GHZ, 1 GB RAM, 200 GB HDD, X3100) pre-installed with Vista. I found it to be excruciatingly slow to multi-task, so my Linux-proficient friend installed Ubuntu 7.10 for me instead. All was well (for a week) until today...

I was chatting on aMSN, running Deluge (torrent program), BOINC, Firefox, and Open Office Writer in the background when the computer suddenly froze. It did not respond to keyboard/mouse actions, but oddly, when I pressed the on/off button, the dialog for LogOff/Restart/Shutdown/Hibernate appeared; but still, I couldn't click or move to select any of them. So I held the on/off button on the laptop to force-shutdown.

Now, when I try to turn it on (both on AC power and on battery), the light for "power" and "charging" lights up but the HDD light doesn't show at all (not even a blink!). The screen is black/blank and does not show the HP page, where it says you can press F10 to enter the bios. I tried inserting Vista/XP/Ubuntu install-CDs to try to get it to boot with no success.

Although it is only ~6 months old, it has gone past heavy usage: that is, 6-8 hrs every day. I've used SpeedFan to monitor my CPU/HDD temp during the last months and it averages around 50-60 Celsius (CPU, under full load), 40-50 Celsius (CPU, idle), and 30-40 Celsius (HDD), so I doubt that it is a problem with overheating. The laptop never fell or gone through any major "shocks"; there is just one minor scratchmark on its top lid.

Already tried calling HP customer care, they're telling me to bring it in to check at the service center. But I won't be free to go out until next week, so I'm trying to find what I can do to try to get it to work!

Any ideas what might be wrong? What should I do now?

[Mike0001]

Get your friend to reinstall Ubuntu, latest version, as an upgrade. Sounds like the boot sector/partition table is trashed. (S)he may be able to repair that from a live distribution of Linux.