Today I was able to fix a “dead” notebook simply by reseating connectors. The customer brought in Compaq nx5000 notebook with the following complaint:
“Laptop shuts down on power up. When the power button is pushed, the laptop flashes green lights for several seconds and then powers down. Unit will not stay on with battery or when plugged in”.
I plugged the AC adapter and tried to turn on the laptop. After I pushed on the power button, fans started spinning and were active for a few seconds and laptop just turned itself off. The video never came on. I tried to power it on for a few times with the same result.
Here is how I fixed it.
First of all I tried simple stuff: remove the battery and start the laptop with AC adapter plugged in, reseat and swap the memory module, remove the hard drive, the DVD drive, the wireless card. Nothing helped to start the laptop normally. After that I went a little bit further. I opened up the laptop case, removed the LCD screen assembly and reseated the video card and… Surprise, surprise, the laptop started fine with an external monitor attached. Just in case I restarted it 3-4 times and each time I got video on the screen. After I assembled everything back, one more surprise was waiting for me. The laptop failed to boot again with the same symptoms. So, the only part that I added before it failed was the LCD screen assembly. I unplugged the video cable from the system board and the laptop started fine again with the external monitor. Now I know that the problem is somewhere inside the display assembly (of course, if the video connector on the system board is fine). The next logical step would be opening up the LCD display assembly and check if all connectors are seated properly. Bingo!!! I wasn’t very surprised, but I was very happy. The video cable was half-way out from the connector on the back of the LCD screen. The laptop started perfectly fine as soon as I plugged the video cable back in place. Fixed!
That was my first experience when improperly plugged video cable prevented entire system from booting.
Read more:
How to troubleshoot and fix laptop video problems
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September 30th, 2006 at 10:13 am
Hey Paul,
You did a very good job troubleshooting your laptop. Here’s what I think:
You might have a failing video card or a bad connection between the video card and the motherboard. Disconnect the video cable from the video card (or system board) and start the laptop with an external monitor attached to it. This test will eliminate the entire display assembly (screen and video cable). If you can get video on the external monitor when the laptop screen is disconnected from the video card (system board), then most likely the problem is somewhere inside the laptop display assembly.
I do not have a straight answer to this question. It depends. You might get a gargled video output, a video with some strange characters all over the screen, or no video at all.
I believe that if you start the laptop without the video card attached to the motherboard, you will not get any video at all, even a basic one.
I don’t know how comfortable you are with taking the laptop apart. When I get a laptop like yours for repair, I usually take it apart completely and minimize to a bare minimum.
System board, video card (if it’s a separate module), memory, CPU (with cooling module) – that’s all you need to start the laptop with a basic video on an external monitor. If I can boot it with video, I start adding parts and test it after each step. If I still cannot boot the system, I start replacing parts starting with memory and CPU. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to troubleshoot a laptop without any test parts.
Make sure that your memory sticks are good. I understand that it’s very unlikely that both memory modules fail at the same time, but anyway. Reseat them again. Move each module into different slots on the motherboard, make sure that you test any possible combination (module 1-slot 1, module 1 – slot 2, module 2 – slot 1, module 2 – slot 2).
Also reseat any cable and connector you can find and access.
Make sure that the AC adapter is good. Remove the battery and try starting the laptop just on AC power, without the battery installed.
Good luck!
September 30th, 2006 at 3:54 am
Ok, this issue sounds exactly like the one I’m having.
I have an Alienware Aurora M770 (supposedly reliable top of the range stuff) Bought it second hand from ebay but it was brand new when the guy sold it to me (he needed his money back) and has been working fine for about 4 months.
What happens. I press power on, Power related LED’s come on, LED clock comes on the front, fan’s have spun sometimes as well.
The hard drive LED shows for about 1-2 seconds and the DVD drive spins briefly, then it all clicks off except for the LED’s and tries again, trying to boot every few seconds. Nothing at all comes out of the speakers or on the monitor.
Now presumably if it was the graphics card, something would come on screen nontheless via the motherboard. If it was the hard drive, then the screen would come on and say hard drive not found, if it was the power supply my fans and LED’s would not stay on.
I have swapped 2 RAM sticks over, and tried to start it with just each one in. I have started it without the hard drive, without the graphics card, and without the DVD drive, just in case one of these were faulty and were causing a boot malfunction. Same thing happens every time.
So I thought it must be a processor issue. Till I read this original post and thought perhaps the screen is not being detected and therefore causing a boot problem. So I tried tried booting with an external monitor, no luck. I then took the LCD display apart (which was really scary!) but could not find any faults in the connections. I did not pull the tape from the back of the LCD screen itself where the wire connects since I did not feel comfortably with that and thought it might break the connection permanently if I started messing with it.
Any thoughts? Also if the graphics card was not detected becuase it was either broke or because the connection was bad where the actual card was, would the system still boot with some basic motherboard visuals, or just not start at all?
In addition the system was bought in UK, and this has happened in Japan where I now live (which makes it far more difficult to get it fixed! However my transformer power pack specifically says 100 to 250 volts is acceptable, the voltage here being 110. And it has worked fine for 2-3 weeks until this happened anyway.
One other thing, my first idea was to reseat some of the componants a few days ago, ad when I reseated my graphics card the system did boot and worked fine for about 15 minutes, then the screen and system froze and kept flicking between the fully lit up screen and what appeared to be a screen without a backlight (ie a very faded out dark image that nontheless displayed the same windows screens I had up). It was stuck like this for a while so I just turned it off, and it hasn’t come back on since, even after me playing with the graphics card a few times to try and make this happen again.
This makes me think it must be a problem with visual hardware not being detected, ie graphics card or screen, since if it has come on a worked perfectly since the first time this happened then all other componants like processor/RAM/hard drive etc. must be working fine and there is simply a poor connection in the visual hardware preventing it from booting.
Is this sound reasoning?
I’m stuck for ideas now and don’t want to give it to a japanese person I can’t understand and pay him 10,000 Yen to tell me its a loose wire somewhere! so any ideas very much appreciated.
Sorry for the length of this post but thought it best to get as much info as possible in at first
thanks for any help you can give!!!!
September 28th, 2006 at 12:36 am
Hi.
I have exactly the same problem on my toshiba A60 after removing the onboard RAM chips. They were dead, and that was told me by memtest86. Instead of replacing the motherboard, I was adviced to remove the chips and put memory in the external socket, by a user with the same problem.. now fixed. I did it carefully without damage in the board circuits, and now, the after pluging new RAM in the socket behind the board, the laptop boots for 2-3 seconds and then shuts down. How can I ckeck out whats happening? Anyone can help?
September 21st, 2006 at 10:03 pm
cj2600,
Thanks for the tip(s).
I’ll try that when I reinstall the new fan.
James
September 21st, 2006 at 9:01 pm
James,
I think the keyboard cable is long enough and it’s not necessary to put the keyboard back in the laptop base during the test. When I have to test the fan on IBM laptop, I connect the keyboard cable to the system board and place the keyboard on the palmrest. After that I can start the laptop from the keyboard and still have and access to the cooling fan.
September 21st, 2006 at 8:52 pm
I believe you helped me find the problem.
The fan wasn’t blowing!
For 15 minutes or so the computer would run fine but no fan.
When the computer shut down and tried to boot back up,
I put my hand back there and felt the fan trying to start. Warm puffs of air but not engaging. I took it apart and pulled the fan. Not much dust and it spun freely with me blowing on it.
I slapped it back together hoping it was a loose Molex connector that was the problem and made sure the connectors where solid.
But alas, the fan continues to not run and the laptop shuts down after 15 or so minutes.
I am heartened by this because now I can replace the fan and (if it is the fan and not a wire
going to the fan) hopefully be in good shape.
This is an IBM thinkpad a21m laptop that I have and the power button is on the keyboard so I had to put it all back together before I could start it and test the fan again
Does anyone know of a way I can start it without the keyboard in place?
Thanks again,
James
September 21st, 2006 at 1:40 pm
cj2600
Thank you for your reply.
I’ll check that out and post a reply here as to my results.
James
September 21st, 2006 at 10:01 am
James,
It might be just an overheating issue. I would check if the heatsink is clean. You can check the heatsink if you lift up the keyboard. When you turn on the laptop, the fan should start spinning. You also can access and check the fan if you lift up the keyboard. Here’s a list of IMB laptop manuals, find your model and go to the keyboard removal instructions.
September 21st, 2006 at 9:20 am
Gilly,
If you didn’t, find the original recovery media (CD or DVD disk), boot the laptop from it and follow the wizard.
When you see “no bootable hard drive found” during laptop start up, it usually means that the HDD is dead or it’s empty and an operating system is not found. It also might happen because of a bad HDD controller on the system board, but it’s not common. If the hard drive is dead, then you’ll have to replace the HDD and reload the operating system from a recovery CD or DVD. I don’t know what level of computer knowledge you have and I have to ask a simple question. Did you reload the operating system after you replaced the hard drive?
Here are some troubleshooting tips.
First of all, I would check if the new HDD is detected and listed in the BIOS. Enter the BIOS setup menu and see if you can see the hard drive in there. If you can see the HDD listed in the BIOS, it’s detected properly and probably you have a software issue. I don’t remember the key that you have to press for Setup on Dell laptops; usually it’s Esc, F1, or F2. On some models you can see this key under the Dell logo witch appears as soon as you turn on the laptop. Try them. You can also can test the HDD with Hitachi drive fitness test, if the test passes successfully, I would assume that the system board and the HDD are fine. Let me know how it goes.
September 21st, 2006 at 9:20 am
What a great site! I have a thinkpad a21m. It boots up fine, runs for 15 minutes and then shuts down, all the LED lights start flashing and it tries to reboot, gets to the thinkpad splash screen, shuts down and tries to reboot repeatedly until I hold the power button down for a few secs to shut it off. If I wait 10 minutes or so it’ll start up and run fine for another 15 minuts and repeat the same cycle. I just bought it used 2 weeks ago and it worked fine for a week. I installed a new hard drive thinking that would help but I still have the same problem.
It did stay up long enough for me to install windows XP (I had it sitting on a vented plastic rack with a fan blowing on it) but then started doing the same thing. Do you think I have a bad fan? I’ve installed all the ibm management utilities. I’m really at a lost. Thanks for any direction you can point me in.
James