I had my laptop stacked away in my closet for about a month after I moved. I finally took it out, but when I pressed the power button, the laptop started, got to the hp splash SCREEN, stayed on it for a while (5 seconds) and then the display went blank and ended up with a CURSOR appearing at the top left of the lcd. Thought it was the hard drive, that the OS has gotten corrupt, so I took out the hard drive and swapped it with a good booting hard drive from another hp laptop. But still the same thing happened. after starting I get the splash screen for five seconds and then the display ends up with a blinking cursor at the top left. By the way, when I tried the original hard drive of the non BOOTABLE laptop in my other hp, it booted up without problem. So it wasnt the hard drive.

Next I took the hard drive out of the non booting laptop. and started the laptop without a hard drive. Same thing happened, splashed screen followed by blinking cursor. So the laptop never got AROUND to reading the hard drive, and it was apparent the problem was with the hardware.

Is this something that can be fixed and in any case what could be causing this behaviorFirst unplug the battery from the laptop and let the laptop sit for 10 min. Then reintroduce the battery to the laptop and see if it boots further.

Also remove and reseat the RAM stick(s) CAREFULLY, with battery removed. Then reconnect battery and try it out.

I'd look in the BIOS if you can get into it and see if it actually detects the hard drive or not. This will tell us if the HDD controller is good and the drive is seen or that the HDD controller is bad.

Lastly you can try to boot off a USB flash drive that has a linux distro on it that is proven a good bootable flash stick by testing on other computer that it will be created from.