White power light flashing but laptop not booting uo
Found an old laptop in my loft, it had no harddrive in it so I've swapped one in from an old smashed screen laptop.
Battery is charging, white power light flashes.
Laptop won't boot up at all.
Any fixes?
Should I have formatted the harddrive before installing?
Thank you
Ist dies eine gute Frage?
10 Kommentare
So changing the ram over to one from my old laptop got it booting up but the screen is blank.
Doesn't appear to have power or there's an issue with the old hard drive maybe having an older operating system on it.
Would that affect it?
von Michael Gow
@Michael Gow The OS doesn't matter much because it will either boot or it won't, and you need to erase it anyway since the Win7 OEM machines rely on OEM specific SLIC keys (activation will not apply) or with Win8 the embedded key isn't the same - again, will not work due to different keys.
Try the hard drive and see, but if that doesn't help then if the CMOS battery doesn't work the board is no good, especially if you replace it to be sure. It's not unheard of on these consumer grade laptops to not like failing drive and have weird POST issues. Asus is also known for it, as well as some consumer grade (Read: Inspiron/XPS) Dells. Sometimes it's a bad LED backlight, but with an unknown history I wouldn't spend much on this - even if I know the odds are good unless the screen was a compatible one I had on hand. If you can afford to burn $50-60 and want to buy one, that's up to you.
In some cases, Dell doesn't have AS MANY (still possible with a really bad hard drive failure) problems on the SMB and enterprise machines (Vostro/Latitude/Precision) but there's a degree of BIOS resiliency that isn't always on the Inspiron or XPS lineup. They are still prone to CMOS RAM corruption issues even with the better BIOSes.
von Nick
So it turns on and power light goes on.. ram and hard drive both from an old laptop... Just the screen doesn't boot up..
Could it be a loose ribbon wire or does it sound like it's past its time?
von Michael Gow
@Michael Gow Did you try the CMOS battery trick, and replacing it? If not, go for that and see.
Otherwise if you can't afford to burn $50-60, don't spend much more time on an i3 Ivy Bridge laptop you found abandoned. It was probably left behind because they had it looked at and it's not economically repairable.
If someone gave me this and wanted me to have it, I would do exactly what I told you - RAM, CMOS battery and then dump it in with the other "parts bin" laptops. Something like this isn't worth spending more than a few minutes on stripping parts from other BER'd machines and a new CMOS battery ($4-5).
Still worth trying the battery, but not much beyond that. Sure you can check the cables as a curiosity, but beyond that and a CMOS battery... don't bother. In some cases, the primary battery is dead and stops it from booting - try that too as a final attempt.
von Nick
Is that the battery that looks like a watch battery??
I've changed that out and everything boots up fine apart from no screen still.
von Michael Gow
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