aegis93

My friend has given me his pavilion dv6700 laptop. It worked fine before and all of a sudden started to not load the OS. By the time he had given it to me it will not load any recovery discs or Linux live cd's or the syslinux command line that is given with the HP USB key utility. this is the damndest problem i have ever encountered and I fear it is a bad board. I want to try to do everything i can though before giving up/

so far i have unseated and reset the 2 ram modules. taken the hard drive out and tried to run knoppix,ubuntu,and syslinux live cd's and usb keys. whenever i load these it gets to the first screen and then the computer is locked. this also happens when i try to go into safe mode and when i try to load hiren or anyother bootable utility or recovery disc. i took the main and cmos battery out of it and performed a hard reset. none of these have had any effect whatsoever.other than a completly faulty motherboard i can only assume it has a corrupt bios somehow. not being able to open a command line at the very least makes flashing impossible. i dont know what to do at this point. i have taken all the data off of the HD and that seems fine. the physical memory tests fine in the bios and bios functions work completly fine without freezing. i have even used it without the battery just in case that was faulty.i need to figure out what my options are from here and what i should do. any suggestions on something i may have missed or where i can go from here would be greatly appreciated,,the computer and components are around a year old. so it isnt in warranty but it is shouldnt be doing this. thanks very much in advance. my friend is a starving artist and i really want to help him not have to buy a new computer/

TriggerFinger

Have you tried using a new/good/working RAM sticks?