I have post in other forums but cannot find an answer. So my laptop had recently not turned(blue light lite, no sounds, no black backlit screen on) on so I figured it was the graphics card, so I ordered a new motherboard(graphics card was soldered to motherboard) and when I swapped out the motherboards, The laptop had worked. About 30 minutes later, It unexpectedly shut off. I tried powering it back on and I heard the hard drive and the fans start to run for half a second and shut off.
So I know its not the graphics card, cpu, or the motherboard that is at fault. Could it be the RAM preventing boot up? Im very stumped at this...
Hm could be a defective Power-supply that triggers an over/under-voltage protection, have you tried running it on batteries alone ? On the other Hand the battery-pack may also cause this. So also try running without batteries.
If you think you have defective Ram, just take it out, and & see whether it gets to the point of complaining about not having any Ram. (if you got a pre-soldered Ram module, you're kinda screwed )
Beware that other hardware can prevent your computer from booting, like a defective harddrive, usb device or mini-pcie wifi-card. take everything out.
Ive tried unplugging the battery and booting and also tried booting from the battery itself. I have also tried removing all perhiprals like the hard drive, wifi card and the cd drive. I also tried booting without ram in the slot, same thing happens, The hard drive and the cd drive start spinning and then like a second later, and it shuts off. But as said above, when I ordered a new motherboard for the laptop, it worked for like 30 mins before shutting down and not being able to get it working. The only difference between booting from the new motherboard and the old motherboard is that the old motherboard doesn't even start spinning hard drives and what not and doesn't turn on and the new motherboard starts up for like half a second or so(screen doesn't turn on, it just remains black and no backlit).
I'm assuming:
- that the second motherboard isn't just a warranty replacement, but actually a second board that you bought.
- The processor & Ram still are the same
I'm going to rule out that you just had bad luck and got 2 defective boards, because return rates for defective electronics are around 1% So statistically speaking 0,01 x 0,01 = 0,0001 -> that's a Chance of 1 in 10'000. (Well ok it's more like a statistically informed guesstimate)
So this leads me to believe that:
- the defective part causing the fault is present in both setups, or
- the common defective part may have damaged the 1st board & then the second
1. Common part to both setups that could just be blocking the boot process are the CPU, barebone electonics like lcd controller, keyboard, web-cam. special buttons etc. You could try to run the board outside the laptop enclosure with a desktop monitor attached to to one of the video out ports , ass well as an external keyboard. (A different Powerbrick as well as a cheap socket compatible celeron cpu would increase information gained from the experiment. -> You have to decide whether that is worth the money)
2. But you could also have (but less likely) a defective part that damages the board if used, my prime suspects are Ram & Power-brick. If this is the case this hole enterprise could turn into a money sinkhole.
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Now that i see that your Avatar picture is the ArchLinux brand icon, There were a number of Samsung & Lenovo Labtops (possibly other brands as well) that had a defective UEFI firmware that could brick the Laptop if you were using a Linux kernel that didn't have "the" workaround. Did you try to use a kernel that you compiled yourself, or a really old kernel ? On these mashines you could also trigger the "UEFI-brick-bug" with a diy SSD upgrade, and I think on the Lenovos you could also trigger it with one of their special thinkvantage windows features. (Tell me if this sounds plausible to you)
The processor is a soldered on i7 cpu so that was different as well with the gpu and the ram is the same, but I could probably savage some ddr3 memory SO-DIMM from one of my other laptops and test it out. The motherboard that i got replaced was one that I had bought.
I will try to boot with nothing attached to the motherboard except the power button connector and connect to one of my external monitors.
I never actually installed ArchLinux on this laptop so that won't be the case for this computer. I normally install it on my very old hardware because ArchLinux is an extremely lightweight operating system.
I will try to boot with nothing attached to the motherboard except the power button connector and connect to one of my external monitors.
great let me know how that went
mhmm... Its not working, I took everything out and left 1 fan in to know if it shuts off. Does the same exact thing.
I just realised that I forgot to ask a few basic things: whoops :)
- did you try taking out the cmos battery? Look up the online database for your labtop there might be a cmos rest jumper or button, that is less crude then taking out the battery for a 1 minute while pressing the powerbutton. Note the battery can be a coin-cell like on a desktop computers, it might also look like a tiny cellphone batterypack with a cable.
- Did the mainboard give beep codes when you tried to run it without any Ram ?
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"and left 1 fan in" -> there is more than 1 fan in your laptop ? -> so full fledged gamer-laptop then.
Yeah you need to plug in all the fans, it is very likely that the a missing fan will trigger a "defective fan" circuit and prompt a shutdown. Fans send a tacho singal (FG signal) back to the mainboard , the mainboard can then calculate the rpm & see whether the fan isn't blocked. A fan controllerboard with a malfunctioning tacho output could trigger "defective fan", while blowing air just fine.
So did you get new fans with the second board ?
- If yes then plug in all the fans.
- If no then it could be a malfunctioning fan controller.
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Assuming it's not the fans and the cmos reset didn't do anything:
The only common parts where
-
the powerbrick Measure the idle voltage of the powerbrick (usually 19 or 20 V, look what the label on the power brick says). Note the idle voltage can be a 1 or 2 volts above what's on the label, also Consumer Voltmeters may have a large error tolerance. The goal of this exercise is to find out if the voltage is way off and hence responsible for grilling both boards. To low voltage will not damage the main board but it will prevent it from booting. Meanwhile your batteries could have been drained & the boards just shuts off because it has no juice.
-
the GPU You could try out running the board without the dedicated gpu, but not every board will cope with that : So you need to find out whether your board can: 1) run with a missing dedicated GPU 2) can dive an external monitor without the dedicated GPU present. The current Intel chipsets that I'm familiar with, have sort of a shared video out system where it depends on the hardware vendor implementation. Taking out the GPU chip should not damage the board, but it could be that it begins angry beeping, or just noiselessly default to the igpu inside the processor.
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Some general things
- It's not likely that laptop boards will run headless : some keyboard & monitor needs to be plugged in.
- Read the vendor's technical manual of the mainboard, those usually contain helpful troubleshooting information.
Tried removing cmos battery and tested, did not work.
No beep codes can be heard
No ned fans with new board.
Tested the output, was a constant 19.12 volts which it says the out put is 19 volts.
Cannot remove GPU, it is soldered to the motherboard.
Can a fan controller easily be checked for operation?
Also, my brother uses this laptop a lot and he sometimes runs it on his bed that covers the fan exhausts, so anything that could easily get overheated could have happened, but the gpu, cpu and motherboard were replaced(actually just the motherboard that has the soldered on gpu and cpu.)
Should I return the motherboard that I had and continue testing with the old motherboard?
So Cmos reset failed, no error-code beeping, & the power-brick appears to be working, properly... That really smells like dead mainboard/cpu.
Can a fan controller easily be checked for operation?
You can look at the tacho signal with an oscilloscope, it's basically just the waveform of a 2 phase (or in very fancy fans 3 phase) brush-less dc motor.
But it would be cheaper to just buy a new fan, most laptops (all that i have seen) use the same 4 pin design that desktop cpu-fans use although often at lower voltage, and with a smaller connector. If you feel up to it you can wire a standard 4-pin-cpu-fan to the Laptop main-board & see if that works. configuration of the pins
...he sometimes runs it on his bed that covers the fan exhausts...
Yeah ok that pretty much means the cpu has been running at ~ 105°C while throttling in a helpless attempt to postpone its death.
Should I return the motherboard that I had and continue testing with the old motherboard?
If you want to continue testing i would keep the board that houses the cpu that your brother didn't kook. I'm not sure if you can trick them into that though ...
I'm out of ideas,
http://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport
or better yet
the forum of the hardware vendor of the main-board, (usually msi asus asrok.....) the brand of the laptop-might just be a re-branding company. look for branding on the board.
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Before I abandon you I’ll describe proper cmos reset again.
- disconnect powerbrick & battery-pack
- HDD SSD or mico-pcie-ssd must be disconnected
- take out the cmos-battery,
- press power-button for 1 min , while cmos battery is out.