Hello there,
I have an hp pavilion dv 8000 with linux OS. Can anybody help me? When i turned my laptop the fan spins for few seconds and stops and the screen is black. What is the problem with my unit?

Give us a bit more than that, for heaven's sakes. We're not magicians.

You say the fan spins up. Does it get up to speed or is it simply given a kick and momentum keeps it spinning for a few seconds? Time it and tell us how many seconds it has power for.

Does any of the lights come on? Does the screen backlight show? Do you hear the disk?
Have you anything that you can stick into the usb to verify there's a voltage supply there? Does it charge the battery? Have you tried it with tyhe battery out? Every detail you notice might mean something, so thoroughly examine it.

Presuming no lights show, and based on your quite insufficient information, I'll guess no power - either internal power supply or something dragging the 5V or 3.3V down. I wouldn't keep playing with it. More stuff might blow. Decide if you're going to repair or replace.

did you try hitting the whatever key to get into your BIOS just to see if it will get you that far, so you'll know you at least have a system board working to that point?

Hi,
When i turn on my laptop, it has one blink in the screen together with the fan spinning for about 3 to 5 seconds. I can hear the disk. It has its power indicator and charging indicator on. I tried removing the battery as well.

Hi,
When i turn on my laptop, it has one blink in the screen together with the fan spinning for about 3 to 5 seconds. I can hear the disk. It has its power indicator and charging indicator on. I tried removing the battery as well.

Which Linux distro are you running?

Frankly, it sounds to me as that this is likely a hardware issue. A web search tells me that this machine may be a decade or more old. Stuff does wear out.

You could try booting to a Live CD of a completely different distro (say Mageia or OpenSUSE, if a *buntu is installed to it).

If you have a monitor, you could try hooking it up. I doubt it will make a difference, but it would not take long to do and would rule out that the issue is the laptop screen.

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Hello and welcome to the forum

If any of the other members' suggestions don't work, you might want to take it to a reputable computer repair shop or technician to see if it can be fixed or just purchase a new (or newer) laptop. You can even purchase one with Linux pre-installed, if that is your preference. System76 is one of several vendors and they ship to sixty-two other countries including the USA.

Regards...

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Hi, Thank you. You're right. This unit is more than a decade already. I am using Linux Mint Distro. I'll gonnan try booting from a cd using different distro.

When i inserted a cd that has no os in it. It seems like my laptop is reading the cd, since i can feel the cd is rotating.

Hi...

Sometimes CD/DVD-ROMs will do this (begin spinning rapidly,) whether anything on the disc is bootable or not.

Regards...

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If the laptop is 2006 or later it should support booting from usb. You can create (and test) a usb bootable device from another machine of the same architecture. In the case of pre-pae chipsets you may need a "special" kernel depending on the distro. Which might be linux-image-486 in the case of debian or debian based distros.

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Powwer on the machine and shine a flashlight at the screen. If the is any text or graphics, the back light or inverter is bad.

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CD spinning means the cdrom drive is probably ok

Sounds like it's failing POST (Power On Self Test). The Bios has a hardware self test programmed in. With a PC, you could buy a POST card and it throws up numbers, stopping on the test that fails, e.g. 51. You look up what test 51 is in your bios and you have a diagnosis. I'vs never seen a POST card for a laptop. The last POST card I had was ISA (Giving my age away) so I don't know really what they do now.

Throw it into a repair shop or throw it out. You could try removing most of the ram & anything inessential to booting; It should boot on one stick of ram. Presuming that doesn't fix it, replace another stick of ram and remove the original. You could pull the hd, and boot off cdrom. That's about all you can do. Then when that fails, decide are you going to fork out for a new motherboard, or buy new.

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