Help! My Envy 14 won't start!

I just took out my Envy 14 today to use after it sat idle (and off, not hibernate) for several days. When I left it, it had 30-40% battery life.

Knowing that the battery is probably pretty low, I immediately plugged in the charger and my USB VX Nano mouse, then hit the power button. The light on the power button came on, the DVD drive whirred like it normally does, but then it shut back off. It then automatically started booting back up (light on power button came on, DVD drive whirred again), and then shut off a second later. The entire on / off process takes about 5 seconds tops, and it repeats this loop endlessly. Nothing is ever displayed on the screen.

I removed the AC adapter and USB receiver for the mouse and tried again - same thing. I had to take the battery out to stop the boot / power off loop. I tried using a different AC adapter (Targus 90W universal adapter, which worked fine previously), and even tried attaching the slice battery. Nothing worked.

Any suggestions? This laptop worked fine just a few days ago and has been off ever since. It has never suffered a drop, spill, or any other type of abuse, and hasn't been opened except to swap out the hard drive and add memory.

I'm VERY hesitant to send it back to HP, since when I sent my previous Envy 14 back for repairs (dead pixels), they didn't fix the problem and even damaged my case. They ended up replacing the unit, but I know if I get a replacement now it's not going to come with the Radiance display.

Ugh.

Edit: just tried again with the AC adapter plugged in and the battery removed. Same thing.

 

Take battery out, unplug the charger and any devices. Press and hold the power button for at least ten seconds. Release. Put battery in and try starting up, if battery is dead and it does not start, connect the charger.

 

Have you tried a hard reset?

 

Just did a hard reset - AC adapter and battery removed, held the power button in for 20 seconds, inserted battery and reconnected AC adapter. It's still in it's non-booting loop.

Just to clarify, nothing is attached to the computer, and there are no CDs / DVDs or SD cards in it.

 

Could one of the components have come loose inside?

 

Please try Envy dedicated support line. They will run through all the steps. They may determine its a bad part had either send you a new one or have you return the laptop for a fix. Hope all works out for ya.

KJ

 

5 second power on and off?

..huh.

*looks stuff up, finds info on a bunch of HP DV6000s/whatever that had bad nvidia gpus that acted like this*

well it probably isn't that precisely but something is messing things up.

Have you tried opening it up a bit, removing the hdd, seeing what happens, replacing the hdd, seeing what happens? removing a stick of ram, seeing what happens, replacing that stick and removing the other stick, seeing what happens, and then..really that's about all you can do before things get to be a pain and/or it's a weird messed up motherboard issue.


..well I mean you could attempt to take out the cmos battery and replace it (but that's a pain too and probably won't do anything).

there's a possibility that somehow someway the bios got corrupted but I dunno how to fix that.

 

there's a key combo that can reflash the bios...

forgot what it is, though. and the CMOS battery should automatically recharge. If it doesn't, then every time you'll see some sort of warning saying the battery is low or the time was reset

 

well I was suggesting removing the cmos to reset the bios settings to default in case something in the advanced bios stuff decided to randomly go "sorry nope, time to never let a computer boot"


wonder what the keyboard shortcut for bios reflashing is.

 

It was like win+b or fn+b...

 

win+b just brings up the windows 7 recovery/boot manager thing.

fn+b is just the beats audio (screw with your bass and treble settings) hotkey.

edit: though apparently holding win+b with a usb stick in the computer (while turned off) and then turning it on should do something.

depends on what insyde bios it is.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-compaq/304332-cq45-insyde-bios-recovery-using-usb-thumbdrive.html

 

It's fixed.

I work on desktops constantly, but rarely laptops. I tried what I would normally do on a desktop - disconnecting various components.

So I removed the hard drive and all the memory. This time it booted for about 10 seconds, DVD drive whirred, a fan came on briefly (which didn't happen before), and it shut back off. Then it went into a loop of doing that.

So I added back in one stick of memory, the one that came from the factory. Sure enough, it started right up. I powered it back off and added the hard drive back in, and it booted into Windows. Just to test, I added the presumably bad stick of memory back into it, and it went back to it's endless 5-second on/off loop.

So, if anyone's Envy isn't starting up property or isn't starting at all, try different memory. Unlike desktops or other laptops that will beep at you if they detect bad or no memory, these just seem to go into an endless boot loop.

Thanks everyone!

 

bad ram stick.

that sucks. well at least your one stick works.

 

Motherboard and Vendor dependent, but yes a typical feature in a reputable brand. Glad to hear everything worked out. For kicks and giggles, what brand was the bad stick or was it factory?

 

meanwhile *goes to check on that there "does win+b work" thing*

...mainly outta curiosity, don't have any sort of bios file on the jump drive.

 

so yeah it does do something.

the capslock flashes once/twice (probably every time it looks at a file) 'cause the jump drive was blinking too.

however it decided to do this forever (jumpdrive only had like 4 files on it) so I hard rebooted.

Screen is black (turned off altogether) when you do the win+b stuff.

 

Hmph. Might explain the problem I had several months back. Wish I'd known about this.

 

The stick of memory was an extra 4GB stick that I added myself (single 4GB stick from the factory). It was G.Skill DDR3-1333.

Everyone has been having great luck with G.Skill lately, so it's probably a fluke. Still, I think I'll go with Corsair or Crucial for my next round.

 

Bringing this up from the dead because I had a similar problem. Last week the envy has been much hotter and much slower. So today I took her apart to clean the vents and when I put it back together the screen wouldn't power with just the caps flashing slowly. Saw this thread and pulled each of my rams and sure enough the bottom one removed fixed it. I had 8g that I bought from HP config that way. Was wondering which RAM stick was your problem? It was werid because I tried to put the good stick in the bottom slot and still wouldn't start so I wonder if its the holder. Did you end up buying another stick?

=Jason-

 

Don't forget to remove that SD card either (if you've inserted one like I did). I was about to start troubleshooting components.