Laptop Won't Boot

drath · D Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1704 Location: Canada

I have recently aquired a laptop to "fix" it. It was the assumption that there was a hardware problem stopping the computer from loading, I am trying to see if that is true; however, i'm not the greatest in diagnosing that. Here's my expirements:

The computer starts up and the ACER boot/load screen comes up. After it finishes, the screen goes blank. No keyboard commands work (ctrl+alt+del).

My initial idea was to try then to boot from the Windows XP CD, or atleast get into the recovery options of it. So during the boot screen, I pressed alt+f10 to get into the recovery/boot menu (I previously had to enable that function in the BIOS menu). The recovery menu was rather weak, it just gave me a list of what device I wanted to boot from, so I picked the DVD drive where the Windows XP CD was. Voila, I thought, the XP loading menu came up! Unfortunately it just sat there with no loading progress.

I have also tried an Ubuntu Live CD to see if it would boot from that and it seems to load everything, then at the end, the screen just goes blank. The hard part about this process is I have to wait about 30 minutes before I can turn the computer on (after unplugging it) otherwise I will not even get a ACER boot/load screen for some reason.

I have also tried booting in safe menu. The same black screen.

It's looking pretty bleak... as in, it's looking like a hardware problem, although I can't guess which part(s) are faulty. The fan seems to be running when the computer is on, and there is low heat coming from it after a couple minutes. Anybody?
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LP-SolidRaven · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 9:14 am Post subject:

This is one of those cases where running memtest x86 never hurts Smile

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spock · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 1:13 pm Post subject:

LP-SolidRaven · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 1:50 pm Post subject:

Doesn't the laptop have a diagnostic utility in its BIOS?
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drath · D Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1704 Location: Canada

Okay, so I don't know exactly how this program works but I let it run for about 3-4 hours and basically the end result was somewhere close to 3 Passes, and 761 Errors. I didn't really go through all the errors but they all had Failing Adresses of "00000000000". What exactly is the problem here?

LP-SolidRaven · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 1:54 pm Post subject:

Failures at address "0000000000" sounds pretty bad. If I'm not mistaken the instruction caches have memory addresses like that.
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drath · D Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1704 Location: Canada

So what are we talking about here? CPU? RAM? The motherboard itself? Don't assume I know what i'm doing here Silly

.
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LP-SolidRaven · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 3:55 pm Post subject:

You should really go to a shop with this thing. Messing with laptop hardware isn't advised as every type of brand has a few things different.
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