Toshiba Satellite L655D Black Screen

Above computer turns on, battery is good, fan spins, but the hard drive does not spin. I hit ESC, F1, F-whatever to see if I can get it to boot into setup, nothing happens. I put a bootable diagnostics disk in the DVD/CD drive and it spins, but nothing happens on the screen. I hooked up a monitor to see if it was the screen, but the monitor doesn't receive a signal. So, I'm thinking it could be two or three bad things. Bad hard drive, but why wouldn't it boot into setup and why is there nothing on the screen? Bad motherboard? That would explain everything, I think. Bad CMOS? Any help with diagnostics here?
Keith

 

Check the CMOS battery first. It should be 3 volt.
The hard disc not spinning up could be bad news.

 

I just thought of another possibility: bad motherboard. Explains all the symptoms. But where is the CMOS battery, any idea?

 

The CMOS battery is on the motherboard. You need to turn off the laptop and remove the laptop battery before removing the CMOS battery.
I'm also thinking bad motherboard. But, there' no harm in checking the cheapest part first.

 

I removed the hard drive and put in my adapter box, hooked it up and read it on my desktop. So it's not the hard drive. Haven't worked up the ambition to take the laptop apart looking for the CMOS battery or replacing the motherboard...

 

Good to hear it's not the HDD - your files are safe.

FYI On some motherboards the CMOS battery is soldered on.

 

That's not a motivator....

 

It would not be the drive or the CMOS because neither would prevent you from seeing something on either the notebook monitor or external monitor. Note the HD is not even touched until POST (power on self-test) completes. And the CMOS information is not read in until after the BIOS firmware is loaded. So even if the BIOS/CMOS was bad, you would see something on one of the monitors.

So that leaves the motherboard or its integrated graphics - bad news either way.

That said, how do you know the hard drive is not spinning?

 

HDD? No sound, no vibration, the light on the case doesn't come on. Gotta be the mobo... Used ones cost as much as a used computer, new ones seem to be from $250-$480. So, I pulled the RAM and the battery, which is fairly new. The rest will be recycled. I saved the data anyway.

 

Well, that could just mean the HD was not getting any power. But still, no power to the HD would not stop everything else.

 

Well, it's trash now. Case closed. Literally.