My old Presario R3000 laptop will not boot. I can get into the bios and I have tried resetting everything to default, but it still won't boot. I have tried booting from the hdd and from an XP cd and both result in the same thing. I turn on the computer and the COMPAQ screen shows with options to get into bios and then it goes black with nothing on the screen. I have done a lot of googling and haven't found much. Anybody got any ideas?

Thanks.

....Anybody?

doesn't it give some kind of error????????

No, it doesn't give any error. It just starts up like it normally would, but then stops.

Have a look here: Tutorial: No POST (Power On Self Test)

Bad hard drive?

If I can get into the BIOS doesn't that mean that the computer does POST? Or is POSTing something else?

It sounds as though that it does initially post.

But, the guide will help you anyway, so I quoted it.
There are many different things to try, (Reseat; Dust; disconnecting externals and internals; benchtesting...)
I hope it came in use, if not; wait for other replies.

Yes the computer is trying to complete the Power On Self Test. It really sounds like a failing hard drive or even a bad CD ROM

But I have tried booting from both the hard drive and the cd rom drive. I doubt that both drives went bad at the same time.

I have opened it up and I will try cleaning it, bench testing, etc. tomorrow.

I think Tmagic650 was trying to say, try unplugging the Harddrive and test to see if it does not shutdown (things like that) that's in the guide And actually helped support what I was saying
Anyway this will take only a few mins to test

Ok, I will try all of this tomorrow. All of you, thanks for the input.

Well I started taking everything apart and I kept trying to boot it up and it still wouldn't work. Then I tried one last time just before I was about to give up and it worked. I turned it off and booted from an xp cd and formatted the hdd. I started to install a fresh copy of xp and just before the part where it asks you for the serial number the computer froze. I restarted the computer and restarted the installation and it froze again except now a little before the last place that it froze. So I tried once more, this time it didn't even get to the installation and now I am back to where I started where it won't get past the boot screen. Anyone know what could be wrong?

I just tried rebooting again and I got this error: "CMOS SYSTEM CHECKSUM BAD"
I only got this error once.

Please also try running Memtest on your Ram (it's in the guide)
I'd also recommend resetting the Bios to setup defaults