A few weeks ago, my wife's laptop (an HP Pavillion dv2000 with an AMD Turion and Nvidia graphics) started acting strange. It would periodically not boot properly. All the lights would light up and the fans would turn on. I could see the hard drive light and the DVD light go on and I knew they were both spinning up. However, the screen remained blank. It wouldn't even flash with the backlights... nothing. There was no bios screen that would show, and no useful diagnostic beeps either. Usually popping the battery out and unplugging the power supply would fix the problem. However, this weekend, even that didn't seem to work very well.
I managed to get it booted back up and made sure it had the latest BIOS (which it did). I also checked the memory and the hard drive. No issues. Strange stuff. I managed to finally get it booted up again last night and I immediately turned off all the powermanagement, so it wouldn't turn itself off, and backed up my Wife's data from her home directory to my Ubuntu server.
For you linux geeks out there I used tar over ssh to backup her home drive. Its a quick and easy way to securely backup files to your server.
