M17x-R2 Hangs at bios screen

My R2 took a dump tonight. It powers on, all the lights come on and the bios post screen (Alien Head) shows up, then it hangs. It just sits there. If I hit the f2 key, it beeps once and doesn't do anything else. If I hit the button again, no more beeps, it does nothing. I turned the computer off this morning and it was working, i put it in my computer bag and took it to work. It never left the bag, just sat in my office. I brought it home tonight and this is what I have.

I have torn it apart and disconnected and reseated all of its cables, the video cards, cpu, memory, everything that could be removed and reseated. It still does the same thing. I have taken the battery out, disconnected the bios battery, unplugged it and held the power button for about a minute, no change.

Since it is hanging during post, I'm guessing that it must be either the video cards, cpu, memory or motherboard. I don't think any other peripheral could cause it to hang like this. I'll go out on a limb and say I don't think it's the video cards since i do get the post screen. Would a bad CPU or memory cause it to hang at post? I know I have had other computers that had bad memory and they never stopped at post. Anyone got any ideas or suggestions? I do not have a spare processor or motherboard to just swap them out with so I'm kind of at a loss right now. Any help is appreciated.

 

Anything can cause it to hang at POST. Try running it on battery power only (i.e. unplug the AC adapter from the R2). Does it still hang? If it does, unplug the battery (the big battery), plug the AC back in and try starting it without the battery in it. Hang or no hang? If it still hangs, try removing your hard drives/SSDs from the system and booting up, make sure to hit F2 to get into the BIOS. Hang or no hang?

 

Reseat ram
Try running single sticks of ram
Blind bios update
Remove gpu and try to boot
Remove io, express card, wifi and Bluetooth and try to boot

So many steps, but in Laymens terms, remove everything bar motherboard, LCD, ram, CPU and try booting, keep adding rest one by one.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. It turned out to be a bad HDD. I've been working on computers for more than 20 years and have seen a lot of bad HDDs. This is the first one I have ever seen that prevented me from getting past the bios post.

 

Great to hear. Like I said, anything can cause a system to hang at POST. Usually it's something to do with the BIOS or power, but back when we had our old HP desktop (Windows 98SE days) the hard drive got laden with viruses and eventually failed. When it failed, the system would hang at POST. Happened twice and replacing the hard drive always fixed the issue. Next suggestion would have been the other system components like the RAM or GPU, but if there was a serious hardware defect in those, the system usually doesn't make it thru POST.

 

Great to hear that you got it sorted out so easily, I've seen those scenarios and normally booting the PC without the HDD and with only 1 memory module is one of the steps that we always follow.