Help me fix these potatoes

[Justiceinacan]

My mother walked into the room the other day with two of my brother's old laptops, an HP Pavilion G7 outfitted with an intel pentium (don't know any other specs) and an HP Pavilion 17 laptop with an A8-5500M (Radeon HD 8550G) 4GB RAM and a 750 GB 5400RPM HDD.

Both should have Windows 8.1 as they haven't been used in a while.

The HP Pavilion G7 PC has a crack open in it right near the power button and I can't even tell if I'm pressing it down it's that bad. Wondering if there's a reason it isn't turning on? It seems to be charging. If I remember, a student took it from him at school and by the time he tracked it down the damage was done.

The HP Pavilion 17 I have no clue what's going on. I have it charging, it turns on, and it's just 10 minutes of black followed by an immediate bluescreen that I can't even read before it bootloops again. I should note I have all the necessary parts for the PC from my own that I used to have except for the chassis - mine had a dead screen and the frame was falling apart.

Any help is appreciated - the idea is to restore one for use in the First Robotics Competition, the other if we can get it going should be for my brother to college. If it were up to me I'd get my brother a recent notebook if/when he even goes to college but I'm not the one making the call.

Thanks guys

 

[Justiceinacan]

Alright update

The HP Pavilion 17 will flash it's logo for about 5 minutes before instantly bluescreening. The bluescreen flashes for about half a second but my camera was able to get the message ; UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME. Does this mean the OS is bad or the HDD or possibly both? Afterward it'll restart and start "preparing automatic repair"

The HP Pavilion g7 just stays black, with occasional flashes of the windows 8 lock screen visible towards the beginning. It even falls asleep too...

Any pointers would be appreciated again.