HP Pavilion 753n BIOS Corruption - Solutions?

[geminiman112]

Old machine, but it's a hobby project to me. I was messing around on the PC, and I rebooted when formatting my hard drive. Dumb idea, I know, but I didn't think I could hurt my hardware that badly. After the reboot, I noticed that the HP Pavilion logo was corrupted upon boot. I thought it was a bit odd, but really didn't think it would be that big of a problem. I tried to use a live CD I was working on. The graphics were all corrupted. System calls were failing. I tried to enter the BIOS Setup. The graphics were hideously corrupted and flickering. Pressing certain keys on the keyboard triggered various graphical hiccups. At this point, I was pretty sure it was the BIOS. I got out Hiren's Boot CD and ran that. The menu was working just fine. Unfortunately, very few programs would actually load. The only one that did load (to my knowledge, I didn't test all of them) was MemTest86+ which reported that every single RAM address was bad. I don't know how much I could trust that, though, given the circumstances. I have not a clue with regard to how I could fix this. I looked for a BIOS image which I could load onto a diskette, but the only thing I could find was a Windows-specific BIOS update. There was no way that I would be able to get Windows XP to install, even if I tried. Thoughts? FYI, I'd like to stick with this machine if possible.

 

[GhislainG]

Rebooting while formatting the HDD can't cause that issue. Remove all memory modules and insert a single one to see if it works. The motherboard may possibly have failed.