Removing the DVD drive fixed my 5x blink boot issues

Question

Hey,
in the past few months or so i increasingly ran into the problem of my Probook 6470b refusing to boot and blinking 5 times which points to a system board malfunction.
I have had this PC for 1.5 years now, and in the beginninig this ocurred maybe once in a month, so i didn't care much about it. This increased drastically lately - statistically speaking my laptop refused to boot every fifth time or about every 20th when trying to force it by powering it up and down continuously.
The issue can be described as the following:
Caps Lock and Num Lock flashing in patterns of five, the screen displaying the HP logo and the DVD drive making some intense noises. After two minutes the PC usually continued to boot through. Alternatively one could remove the battery and try it again.
Due to the drastically increased occurances of this i contacted my countrys HP support and the store, but both refused to look into it because of the german 'revisal of the burden of proof' after six months. So i deciced to look into it myself.
This issue seems to be quite common accross a wide range of HP laptops, with some weird suggestions on how to fix it on the internet. In my opinion you have to differentiate between faulty soldering connections or burnt through chips and my described issue.
Similar accounts can for example be found here: [1] [2] [3] [4]
As this issue occurs on business laptop variants still on sale i think HP should be quite interesting in fixing this.
After a long preamble, here's the fix i found:
because the DVD drive made some noises usually not heard when booting as expectedi removed my Drive.
I tried powering the laptop on 30 times directly afterwards without problems and have been running this for 1.5 weeks or 25 successful power ups now (i kept a tally list). If it should fail eventually i will update this post.
Without the dvd drive the laptop looks a bit ghetto and is quite prone to dust, but i am thinking of buying a dummy drive that can be used to mount a second HDD.
As this issue increased after time my guess is that this is because of some BIOS update that assumes an error when the DVD drive isn't responding fast enough on boot.
Could a HP engineer please look into this?
I have the B6P73EA variant running BIOS 68ICE Ver. F.61 of 01/21/2015 with a DVD Drive manufactured in January 2013 by PLDS; P/N 6757534-HC1
Thanks very much!<script src="chrome://YTAutoHDDE/content/YTAutoHDDE.js" type="application/javascript" charset="UTF-8"></script>

Answer 1

Probook 6470B is the model. 
As part of the POST process the computer will poll the drives and it is not unexpected that a bad optical drive will cause the whole process to hang before the computer boots. That is normal behavior. This is a peer to peer Forum by the way and the HP Engineers (other than those who choose to participate) are not monitoring the activities here.
I am glad you figured out the problem. A replacement DVD drive should not be too expensive or, as you suggest, you can use an optical to hard drive adapter. I believe HP also makes a blank for that space which ought to be really cheap.