Help with this laptop? What do you think is wrong?

Gateway MX7115 laptop manufactured in 2006


OK, so I buy this laptop from this guy. I talk down from a set price to $140 after he tells me that the hard drive has failed and needs replacing. I get the laptop home, replace the HDD and oooo and ahhhh over this seemingly remarkable deal that I've just gotten when.....

Windows Setup Hangs When "Setup Is Starting Windows" Screen Appears

Now, since receiving that error message I have:
installing without wifi card, battery, and using a different HDD
tried installing Win2000 and got to the same point
tried installing WIN98 and it gets to the detecting Plug and Pray hardware and locks up
adjusted BIOS settings to compensate; (legacy USB support/plug-n-play OS, etc)

When the PC locks up I am unable to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart it.


Another interesting tidbit here ... when this started, I wanted to run memtest from floppy and test the memory, so I hooked up my USB floppy and a new problem revealed itself. No USB devices are recognized : USB Flash drives, USB floppy, USB HDD, etc.


So i emailed the guy that I bought it from and basically asked him, how he knew his HDD went bad....and he replied because it just stopped booting one day, no blue screens, just locked up in both normal and safe modes. Long story short...he refunded $70, half of the total purchase price.

I think the problem is the system board...second opinions?

Hi you could always try a boot or recovery cd. I didn't have blue screen either but was having major snags. A friend told me to go to this site and get hte above and I have not had a problem since. http://www.user-guides.co.uk