Why Toshiba Tecra TE2100 laptop locks up or will not boot at all?
One of our biggest customers use a lot of different Toshiba laptops and one of the models is Toshiba Tecra TE2100. We repaired many of these units and we noticed that some of them had very similar problems:
- Laptop locks up when you move it or sometimes freezes by itself. The video is still on, but the acupoint (keyboard mouse) and the keyboard itself do not work anymore.
- You can start the laptop, but you see CMOS (RTC) battery error on start up. After you clear the error, the laptop boots fine. After you reboot the laptop, you get the same error.
- Laptop will not boot at all. There is no power or power LED blinking. There is no hard drive activity. There is no external or internal video.
- When you press power button, laptop shows some activity, but there is no video on LCD screen.
At the beginning, when we just started working on this model, we tried to fix CMOS (RTC) battery error by replacing the RTC battery. Unfortunately, it didn’t help to fix the problem at all. We found that the main culprit of the problem is a poor connection between the system board and the power board (CMOS battery is connected to the power board). In some cases you can fix the problem by reseating the power board. Carefully disconnect if from the system board and connect it back. Turn on the laptop and see if it fixed your problem. If it didn’t help, most likely you have to replace the system board and the power board. Unfortunately, I cannot say exactly which one is causing the problem, the system board or the power board. The same story with laptop lock ups, try to reseat the power board.
You can fix a video problem by reseating the video card. We noticed, that over time the video board pops up from its connector on the system board and you can get video if you push it back in place.
Conclusion: before you start replacing parts, disassemble the laptop and try to fix the problem by reseating the power board and the VGA board. My disassembly guide for Toshiba Tecra TE2100 can help you to take apart the laptop.
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September 6th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Good Day ..
I have a Toshiba te2100, I had some problem like not booting at all and after removing and reconnecting the main battery , it used work . But now it is not booting at all . When switch on , the power indicator turns yellow and flashes . Can you pls help me on this .
August 26th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Daniel,
Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 has a discrete video card, it plugs into the slot on the motherboard. Overtime, the video card might pop up from the motherboard and you’ll get all kind of weird problems with video (bad image, freezing, etc…) The keyboard and the touchpad are plugged into the video card, probably that’s why you cannot use them after the laptop freezes.
You can try this. To access the video card you’ll have to lift up the keyboard. This disassembly guide will be very helpful. Follow steps 5,6,7,8. Remove the battery before you start. In order to remove the keyboard strip shown on the step 5, I believe you’ll have to remove two screws from the bottom of the laptop. Do not disconnect the keyboard from the video card, just flip it over on the palm rest. When you get an access to the video card, gently press on the lower left corner, it might help to get a better connection between the video card and the motherboard.
Assemble the laptop back.
Warning! If you are not careful, you can damage the laptop. Proceed at your own risk and do not blame me.
August 25th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Hi folks,
i´m owning a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 running WinXP Sp2 full patched and with the lastes drivers.I only use the power supply unit. I reinstalled the maschine twice and the following error won´t went away.
If i boot up the maschine it freezes completly at the login screen of WinXP. During this time it won´t accept any keyboard or mouse (tried trackpoint and external mouse)input.
After a short periode of time (5- 15 min) it “wake up” and let me work. Sometimes I have to reboot the maschine several time until I let me login.
Several post that i found via goole let me think it have something todo with the motherboard. Did anyone of you have had this problem.
If someone know how to fix it by myself. It would be great.
Thanks,
Daniel
August 7th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Great stie for laptop help! Looling at how to disassemble an a55 I don;t see where to get to the power supply. The laptop I have shows no power even with the AC plug in. Maybe a bad plug? Is there an easy test on the AC plug?
July 29th, 2007 at 4:24 am
Hi everyone, I have had the same power issues described above and found that melting the solder in the joints in the power board where it connects to a cable that connects to the main board fixed my problems. after reading everyones reports on the problems i decided it was probably dry joints in one of the connectors and i thought it might be the one in the main board because the power would cut out if i lifted the laptop by that area.
So if you’re skilled with a soldering iron i would recommend redoing the joints to the cable that connects the power board to the main board (on the power board end)
July 26th, 2007 at 1:31 am
i have problems with my tecra 9100, very similar to comments made here, all of the symptoms are present. Example: i/o error; not working on batery; random freezing and blocking; wireless not present and …. else.
Solution so far is every couple of days open the notebook to the bone, and thighten the connection between i/o and cpu board. when i re-seat the boards the problems vanish but that only gives me couple of hours and after that problems all over again.
My question: can something be done besides change of the boards all together. I mean how to improve the connection between boards without buying new ones.
July 25th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Rick,
You lost the only the sound or the wireless connection doesn’t work either? Check out this post related to the Tecra 9100 sound problem.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
i have a toshiba tecra 9100 laptop win xp serivce pack 2 …i lost the sound and i uninstalled the sound driver ac-xg ..i tried serveal drivers
but cant get the sound back. it acts like it dosent see the hardware to install the driver. any help… i bought this laptop used and dont know to much about it…thanks…rick
July 24th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Thanks for the article… have the same issue with an older model laptop.
July 13th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Femi,
Try pressing F12 on startup. It should give you a boot menu where you can choose CD/DVD.
If you press “C” key on startup, it will force the laptop to boot from the CD/DVD drive without going to the boot menu.
Pressing Esc or F2 key should take you to the BIOS setup menu and you can change the boot order in there.