HP Compaq 8510p - Dead ?!

[Modjo]

Hello everybody.

I have a HP Compaq 8510p laptop, which was running great up until last night.
It all of sudden shut down and wouldn't startup again - Not even the power supply bulb had a light in it, even though the PSU was still in. So far i have tried numerous things, but nothing seems to do the trick and i would be really sad losing all the data stored on its hdd.

Here's what i have done:

1. Left it for a couple of hours with the PSU in it.
2. Tried replacing the PSU.
3. Tried replacing the battery.
4. Tested both PSU and battery in another laptop (Same model).
5. "Took out the battery, removed main supply, held power button down for 30 secs, put only power supply in.
Turned laptop on
Put the battery in."

Like i stated, none of the above worked and i am, honestly, starting to get a little desperate.

Thanks in advance :-)

[DaveLembke]

You stated:

3. Tried replacing the battery.
4. Tested both PSU and battery in another laptop (Same model).

In Step #3 was the battery placed into the non working computer from the working computer a battery pack with a good charge to it? I have seen a couple times where battery packs less than 25% life expectancy in charge left to them wont boot a system. If this was done with a battery that was fully charged then its not a good sign for the troubled computer.

When there is no power indicator lit when PSU is plugged into laptop and the PSU and battery are both known to be good, its usually main board dead and so dead that the charging circuit doesnt even want to function. This is a rare failure as for 99% of the time a bad main board will show that it will charge a battery etc, but the main board just wont boot or it has other issues.

The data on the hard drive can be easily accessed by carefully removing the hard drive and installing it into an external case, or since you have same exact model laptops, if your careful you can remove the hard drive out of the working laptop and install the hard drive from the troubled one into it and boot it up without issues (maybe). On older computers this worked almost every time between same models, but the way that the OS protects itself, it might come up with a blat that the hardware has changed on a newer computer that keeps track of hardware ID's. Best and safest direction to go with this if the laptop is never coming back to life is to buy an empty SATA Hard Drive Enclosure for 2.5" drive and install HD into that and then access the data by connecting this to USB port of the working laptop.