M35X-S149 Powers Up, But Won't Boot (Black Screen)

I'm trying to repair a friend's Satellite M35X-S149. The thing powers on (power light comes on, and fan briefly spins up), but after about 5 seconds, the fan turns off, and it doesn't ever boot nor display an image on screen. It never appears to POST (no beeps, nothing -- I've never worked on Toshibas before, but I assume no beeps isn't normal). Things I've tried:

-Hooking up an external display and pushing Fn-F5 to enable external display. No luck.
-Removed battery, booted strictly AC power, no luck.
-Opened up system re-seated RAM, moved to new slot and flat-out replaced it with known good RAM, and didn't work either. Removing RAM entirely didn't change things.
-Made sure the tilde and/or tab keys weren't stuck, as that was some random article I read on Toshiba's KB.
-Removed HD entirely, no help.

Short of completely dismantling the system and re-seating the CPU, anything else I should be looking for, or is this just a lost cause?

Biggest reason I want to get into the system is that the friend who wanted it fixed said that her husband took some "personal pictures" in there that she doesn't want to lose or have get out in the open, but trusts me with them. I know I could just rip out the HD, but what fun would that be?

Ideas?

Oh, I know I can get the files off the hard drive. That's not the issue. Was just trying to salvage the rest of the laptop so she doesn't have to go buy a new one.

Thanks for that -- having a POST beep would certainly help.

Anyway, so just for giggle, I plugged in again today and turned it on -- and it actually boot for a split second. I saw the POST screen, so I hit F2 just to get into the BIOS. Went into the BIOS, and it went black after about 3 seconds, and then black screen like before. The only different between this time and last? I had the DVD tray ejected. No idea why that did it.

Of course, it did that a couple times, and now won't do it at all. Figures...

Just thought I'd throw it out there, but I have a feeling we're going to have to go the "remove the hard drive and get the data off" route.

Another update: Pulled the hard drive, and it appears that the hard-drive is corrupt or has been formatted. I plugged it into a little USB 2.0 reader I have, and Windows didn't recognize it. I ran Western Digital's disk diag tools on it, and the extended test came out fine. I ran FreeUndelete and a few other tools on it, which found several bits and pieces of files and folders, but nothing really exciting.

The Toshiba recovery DVD was in the DVD drive when I got this thing. Does that DVD format/erase the drive when it's ran? Maybe it was ran part way and died in the middle because of the above, pre-existing hardware problem?

Thoughts?

That's what I figured, too, as that's how 99% of the systems I've worked worked.

And an update on the HD front. Apparently he was in the process of using the recovery disk to get his system just setup again from scratch (he didn't care about the data on there). So when I hooked up the HD to another system, it couldn't read it as it wasn't fully formatted properly, but still did have remnants that the DVD had tried to put data on there (running undelete programs were able to get bits and pieces of the windows directory, for example)


Yeah, I'm thinking that's about my last hope, short of replacing the motherboard.


Boy, I sure wish it did, but no. When it locks up, the power LED stays on, and any LEDs that were on at the time of lockup stay on. So if I was hitting the FN-F5 key to see if the LCD was off, it leaves the little FN LED under the F-key row turned on (the FN key isn't causing the lock-up, just using that as an example).

I'll look at that site that describes how to dismantle the thing and see if getting to the CPU would be a royal pain. Thanks again for everybody's help!

Tried reseating and regooping the CPU. After I get it all back together, I'll try the hard reset if nothing works.

Thanks again!

OK, got it all back together after re-seating the CPU, didn't help. Tried the hard reset, didn't help.

Talked to the owner of the laptop, he said he's just going to put the thing on eBay for parts (unless somebody here wants it for parts). He'll probably pull the hard drive and RAM to put into a new laptop, but otherwise, he's getting rid of it and buying a Mac, he says (I didn't want to start a debate with him on Mac vs. PC).

Thanks again to everybody here!