Posted on 12/17/2013 6:12:57 PM PST by GeronL
My nephew has a Toshiba Satellite A205 with Windows 7, 3GB RAM and 200GB harddrive. We were downloading "Marvel Heroes" and had gotten down to the last few packages when it went black. Nothing was working. The light indicated it was "on" but there was zero activity for a very long time. Rebooting.. nope it did not reboot. The "on" light turned on but there was no booting whatsoever. I had just cleaned the harddrive out of all malware days ago, it was purring like a kitten before this. Now it doesn't even attempt to boot.
I need help resetting this or making it work somehow.
There are lots of those Toshibas floating around. Save the HD and at least he won't lose anything. Except the laptop. But the data should be there.
/johnny
I guess downloading “Marvel Heroes” which is apparently 15GB or something like that, was just too much for the motherboard?
I have a second power cord and nothing happens with that one either. It’s the one I am using right now, on the Toshiba Satellite I am using to type this.
Had a Dell laptop that did the same thing. Turns out the Nvidia chip on the main board went bad, so it may be a main board issue. There are ways to open the back of the laptop, heat the Nvidia chip with a hairdryer for a few minutes, let it cool and then it will boot up. The heat reseats all the solder in the chip. This was a known problem with this chip and main board.
It was only a temp fix until the board could be replaced.
he didn’t really have any data on it, I just gave it to him the other day after me and my fellow FReepers cleared all that Malware from it.
I read down to post 20 before this reply. One poster pointed out that the PC is not even trying a bios boot. Remove the hard disk, beg, buy or steal an ATA to USB cable. Plug the drive in to a working PC’s USB port. If the drive is not toast, it will mount as removable storage. You can use the drive to restore your data to a new computer.
/johnny
If there’s no Toshiba splash screen, then the bios could be messed up or motherboard is fried.
Ok, you’re not going to like my diagnosis, but from what you are saying, the most likely thing to me is a fried motherboard.
If the power light comes on, you have power, so it is probably not a bad power supply, or battery/charger issue. If it was the hard drive, you’d still get to BIOS, and if it was the monitor, you’d still hear it booting up. If it was the RAM, you would still hear it try to boot and get error beeps. So, there aren’t too many other options left except a fried motherboard. It could be some other component failing that I’m not thinking of, but that would be the prime suspect, and a pretty common failure since laptops run hot.
ah, then i’m 90% sure it’s a system board fault.
it’s rare but it happens. i’m sure you can just pop that hard drive into another same laptop and fire it back up and continue.
personally, i only had two failures with laptops, and they resulted from, leaving the laptop in the car overnight in the cold virginia winter, then powering it up in the warm office killed the harddrive. i swore i’d never do this again for the third time.
If that does not do it, take out the HDD and boot from a live distro -I suggest System Rescue CD if you have it, if not then just use whatever live bootable media you have, even a w2k or even 98SE bootable disk to see if the hardware still works.
If NoJoy then suspect the SysMem as the culprit. Carefully remove and then swap them after wiggling them back into place to see if that affects anything.
Not familiar with your particular laptop but when that last happened to Me it was the CMOS battery that had died and I had to replace it before the system would even boot.
Good luck, mate.
You might try this:
Turn it off — close the cover.
Remove the power cord, if connected.
Remove the battery.
Reinstall the battery.
Power up.
==
Sometimes the built-in screen saver will cause that kind of problem.
Once the power supply is ruled out, the next two tests are: 1. Are you getting any beeps when it attempts to post up? If so, how many beeps
2. Can you hit the Delete Key or F2 to get into the Bios?
If no beeps and you can't hit the Delete Key or F2 to get into the bios, then it's most likely your motherboard. The problem with some of the older Laptops is they get awfully hot and if the exhaust fan stops working the CPU will overheat and bite the dust. Laptop CPU's are soldered onto the motherboard (in most cases) so if the CPU's fried, the motherboard's no good.
Downloading shouldn’t be very taxing at all on the motherboard, that work would be mainly done by the network card and the hard drive. When you have a fried motherboard, it can be something catastrophic (got REALLY overheated once), or chronic (got kind of hot frequently). Laptops are prone to either kind of failure, since they are just not designed to dissipate heat very well.
If you are going to use a laptop for extended periods, even if you aren’t playing games or doing something intensive like that, I’d suggest getting a laptop cooling pad, just to be safe.
Try resetting the BIOS/CMOS by removing the battery from the motherboard (and re-installing it). It looks like it’s under the keyboard on that model (according to this video at about 3:15):
http://www.laptopinventory.com/LaptopInventory.php/Toshiba/Satellite/A205-S5804/Motherboard
Wow - I’m not any computer guru so I’m sorry I can’t help you. Totally powered it down and let it sit for a bit? Sounds like it’s not getting power ....????
Not being snarky, but age will do it. (btw I have the same model, and I don’t think it will last much longer).
take the battery out and disconnect from the external power
Hold down the power button for at least 30 sec .
connect to external power source (AC adapter) without the battery installed.
If it boots up, you can put battery back in later after shutting down.
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