Please Confirm My Laptop Is Hosed

I think my old rebranded clevo laptop is beyond home repair and i'd appreciate a best-bet confirmation of that from anyone who knows more than i do. It has other problems and i only use it as a media downloader and player, so it's not worth spending any money on it.

It was working fine with no warnings about what happened next. I ran it off a live usb to resize the partitions, and the bios menu seemed to be having trouble saving the new boot order. After i was done and tried to reboot, i get what looks like the first ~1 second of boot, including power lights, a nudge to the dvd drive, and a spin of the fan (which stopped after a few tries). Then nothing, blank screen. No indicator lights on preinserted thumbdrives, which is supposed to happen very early in the boot process. No response to boot menu button (standard one plus various others suggested online). No help from removing the motherboard battery for a long time. No error beep from trying to boot without ram (not sure about this motherboard but i gather that's a common indicator). No help from swapping ram sticks, or any combination of battery in/out, hd in/out, most anything i could try disconnecting. The 1 second of boot is the same under all conditions.

Seems to me like something is broken at a boot stage too early for an end-user to fix, my guess being corrupted bios or hardware fail of memory holding it, etc.

In any case, of course you can't tell for sure, but i'd appreciate an experienced person's confirmation that i'm probably hosed.

Thanks for the forum, and thanks in advance for reading and any response,

Hosey McHoseface

 

Have you tried booting from the Linux Live usb since this incident? ie can it boot from the usb stick

A corrupted bios would not feature on my list

 

Yeah, it is extremely rare for BIOS firmware to become corrupted. Typically, if corruption happens (and again, this would be very rare), it is during a "flash" update - not after the BIOS has already been flashed. The CMOS info might become corrupt but a simple reset should revert it back to the defaults and let it boot - at least through POST.

The ~1 second attempt at booting suggests to me power. You say you tried with and without the battery, but have you tried a different power supply/charger? Unless you have an exact model spare laying around, I recommend trying a 90W universal charger, preferably one with automatic voltage selection like one of these. With a universal charger, you won't end up with a non-compatible charger you can't use on other notebooks. I keep a similar model in my road kit for service calls when troubleshooting notebooks. You select the proper tip and voltage (unless yours automatically adjusts its output voltage) for the battery and notebook. Thus far, I have had no problems using mine on my own Toshiba, as well as several clients’ Dells, HP/Compaq, eMachine, Sony, Lenovo, Acer, and even Apple notebooks.

I recommend getting a 90w or larger model. Some are only 65w or even less. These lessor models will still work as chargers but may not have enough power to charge the battery and run the notebook at the same time.

And out of curiosity, what do you mean by a "rebranded" clevo?

 

Thanks for the responses.

risk_reversal] It's precisely a live usb that i'm using as an indicator, that i have inserted before power up and doesn't even get the initial poke. I believe that very early in boot the hardware is checked, so a first flash of a thumbdrive and the quick spin i am still getting of the dvd, but it's later in boot that they are actually read as in looking for an OS to boot. For instance i have a bios/boot password on another unit, and it checks the usb and lights the indicator on the thumbdrive very briefly before it asks for the password (about 2 seconds into boot), and after that will again read the usb and boot a live image if i'm using one. But i'm not even getting the first check of the usb.

Digerati] Since i'm getting exactly the same behavior from AC and battery and both, and they both had been fine just before the problem, which was preceded by mucking around in bios to set boot order to use a live image to work on my partitions, i'm betting it's not the AC...? I'm undereducated-guessing about bios due to how early this is happening (and the odd behavior of not wanting to save new boot orders), but maybe it's a m-board failure that involves bios/etc memory? Rebranded = it's a System76 which was actually made by clevo.

Thanks again!,
HMH

 

I never bet it is not power, until I verify it.

If you have not verified your charger is working by trying a different charger, then how do you know your battery is fully charged when testing on battery only?

 

First thing is i don't have another compatible charger available, or i'd've done that -- we agree that much.

But we each can pick a different point where we give up. I truly appreciate the input and this is text between strangers so i don't want come off as argumentative -- but i don't want to blow you off either. So for the fun of thinking it thru and chatting, i'd answer this way: I'm content to bet that what's *not* happening is [1] both the AC and the battery went bad at the same moment, while doing something unrelated to them and more related to the failure mode (bios, initial boot), +[2] both to the identical specific level such that they allow the identical partial boot but no further into the boot process, (+[3] which i'm not sure is how the power load of boot even works, that further steps such as poking the thumbdrive would take more power), +[4] yet the battery is holding that specific inadequate charge so that it can give identical behavior thru the dozens of boot attempts i've made while working on the problem. If you're much more tenatious than i am, i hope you can at least see that as a rational place for someone else to give up on it being the charger?

At this point i think i'm good, tho if you have more that's constructive to say, go ahead!

Otherwise, thanks again for your and everybody's input!
HMH

 

You aren't. I hope I'm not either.

We all come at problems from different angles. If you check the link in my sig, you will see I approach hardware issues from the viewpoint of a formally trained and certified electronics technician where we are taught and trained to start at the beginning; is it plugged in? Is it turned on? Are we providing the correct voltages to the right places?

As far as not having a spare charger, that is exactly why I suggested a universal charger that you may be able to use as a spare for any notebook (even if it does not resolve your problem here). Then it would not be a total waste of money. Getting an exact replacement charger that probably won't be compatible with any other notebook, besides often costing more from the start (since they are proprietary) might be a total waste if it does not resolve the problem.

I agree that is not likely, but not impossible either. What is more common, however, is one fails first, then it takes out the other. In electronics, it is called a "cascade failure". For example, batteries can develop an internal short (a common cause of car battery failure). This short causes a demand for excess current from the charger. Excess current creates excess heat and that can take out the charger. Or going the other way, that short can put an excess demand on the voltage regulator/divider circuits inside the notebook, again causing excess heat, which then takes out a component in that circuit - in which case neither a new battery or new charger will fix it.

The main point I am making is because everything depends on good, clean, stable power, from a proper troubleshooting viewpoint, it is necessary to verify good, clean, stable power is provided before spending good money on, for example, a new motherboard.

Now of course, this all depends on how much value you put in this notebook in the first place. You made a point of stating in your opening post that this notebook is "old". This just may be the excuse you need buy yourself a new, modern, and much more capable notebook that is able to carry you years into the future.