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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May 25th, 2008 at 2:44 am
Yes it is definitely a memory Slot B failure.
Slot A works fine. But I did once in the past couple of days get a blue screen failure and it quickly rebooted so it may be Slot A will fail soon.
Does anyone know where I need to solder to fix the memory Slot? Is it on the back of the board?
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I dug out a Tecra 8100 Laptop. It has 512Mb RAM. Sometimes it boots and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s never worked long enough for me to play around on it.
I read Tecra’s are notorious for bad memory slots so I thought I would give it a try before ripping it apart. By the way I booted up a live CD of knoppix and ran memtest and if I moved it wrong the errors would start scrolling.
Anyway I tried both memory chips in Slot A and it, so far works great. I try both in Slot B and failure, doesn’t boot up. So it appears to be a Slot B memory slot failure. I’ve heard of people putting thin pieces of cardboard/paper to snug the memory up and I haven’t tried that yet.
Is there a reason the memory slots fail? Could it be related to the I/O board screws coming loose? Or is it just related to the memory pins loosening up?
If the cardboard doesn’t help is there a real fix for it?
May 18th, 2008 at 9:45 am
dezzy,
Yes this is a common issue and I think your problem is related to the I/O board. We had repaired a lot of this units in the past and we had replaced tons of I/O boards because of sound/wi-fi problems.
Take a look at the instructions for a Tecra 9100 disassembly. As you can see on the disassembly step 12, the wireless card slot is located on the I/O board and the sound card connects to the I/O board through two flat cables. When both Wi-Fi card and sound fail at the same time, most likely this failure is related to the I/O board.
May 18th, 2008 at 5:41 am
i have a toshiba tecra 9100, wireless not working and no sound working, could this be i/o card? i have reinstalled software and exactly the same.
i have heard there is a common fault with this,
please advise if possible
thanks for yor help in advance
dezzy
April 12th, 2008 at 1:56 am
Hi,
My TE2100 has been working well for about 5 years until now! I left it during dinner and came back to find it apparently shutdown. Now it refused to start at all. The external power LED (green) and the charging (orange) LED light, but the power button has no effect at all. Is this perhaps a power PCB fault, or could there well be a main PCB problem? If the main PCB is changed, is there anyway to change the ethernet MAC address to the original address, as much of my SW is licensed to this number?
Thanks for your help.
March 16th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
I was getting the classic “Bad RTC battery/Bad check sum (CMOS)” error, but the laptop kept freezing whenever I tried restoring the BIOS defaults and/or leaving the laptop running to recharge the RTC battery.
Followed the Tecra TE2100 Disassembly Guide to step 23 – removing the power board. Reseated/reconnected it, and voila! No more RTC errors.
The old girl has run smoothly ever since.
March 16th, 2008 at 11:16 am
i want to reply to #214…i just got a toshiba satellite off EBAY with the same problem…when you plug it in you get a green power light and a battery charge light.but when you press the power button the charge light goes off and the power light flashes an orange pattern of (short,long,short,short,long,short,long,long)does this with ac plugged in,just battery,and both plugged in….can anyone help?
March 8th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
It won’t boot without a video card. TE2100 has a geforce4 video card that gets really hot. Mine got so hot it un-soldered the pins on the card. Had it repaired but it lasted just a couple of weeks. Got a replacement instead. Now I use it with an electric fan pointed at it all the time.
March 8th, 2008 at 11:42 am
My TE2100 doesn’t recognize the sound card. I restarted but same result. The first time it did it I updated the sound drivers and the sound came back. Today it has lost the card again. No sound. Should I try to reseat the card ?
March 6th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Wow, it seems that I’,m not the only one with a TE2100 problem…maybe there’s someone out there who can give me a clue on the following: My unit decided all of a sudden not to boot anymore (that’s how I found this execellent website). If I plug the power cable in the LED indicating power is “green” and the LED indicating charging is “yellow”. After a while (a couple of hours in fact) the charging LED turns “green”. As soon as I hit the “power on ” button the harddisk tries to fire up, stops and the power indicator LED gives the following sequence (I chose Morse code – I’m not to sure if ‘.’ or ‘-’ stands for ‘0′ or ‘1′): .-…..- (could read 01000001 or 10111110). Has anybody any idea what this means? Any help is greatly appreciated…..