I have a disabled Toshiba Satellite laptop that I received from my friend tonight. Normally, I'm an okay PC technician. However, I only work on desktops. Not thinking that there is much difference between laptops and desktops besides the formfactor and obvious differing hardware requirements, I offered to take the "broken" laptop off his hands. He told me the immediate problems were that upon turning on the PC, there would be no video on the monitor and the only seemingly thing that would turn on on the laptop would be the fan. He said he didn't drop it and nothing was spilt on it. He said it just stopped working one day. Think it was a minor screen problem that could be fixed, I happily took it home and went straight took work.
Immediate Findings:
I noticed at first that the led for the HDD reading light on the front of the laptop would not flash to indicate that the HDD was being read from upon booting. I didn't really worry about this because I know there are some BIOS options to disable this. Upon further inspection, I noticed that the keyboard, when the laptop is turned on, reacts to buttons presses such as the FN key (The FN led light toggles on when the FN button is pressed) but the CAPS LOCK button does not light up (The led light is built into the button). At first, this made me think that the motherboard was a-okay since the keyboard was responding to a extent. Another finding that reinforced this theory was the DVD drive. Upon booting up, the DVD drive led would light up and you could clearly heard the DVD drive spinning in attempt to locate a CD/DVD in the drive and quiet down after failing. This let me know that the connections to the DVD drive were working appropriately. Another finding was also the led's for the Battery and Charging indicators. They would light upon inserting the laptop's charging cable. So I crossed off battery from the list for obvious reasons. This also reinforced that the mobo couldn't be the problem. I then turned my attention to the HDD. I removed the cover and opened the DVD drive (to keep it from spinning up) and listened for sounds coming from the HDD. Despite what the led for the HDD indicator told me, the HDD was indeed spinning up. I could hear it reading as well. I also noticed that upon booting, there would be no POST beep or POST screen on the monitor. I held the laptop at an angle to the light in my room to see if the possible problem was a broken backlight. However, there was no information on the screen at all, let alone a backlight booting. There was also no sounds indicating that Windows was booting through the speakers OR headphones.
TL;DR: The HDD, DVD and battery's worked fine. There was no apparent problem with the connections. However, there was no sounds indicating a booting PC (no POST beep or Windows 7 "DING" to show that windows booted up via the built in speakers or headphones.)
Actions Taken:
I took the initiative to check the HDD to ensure that it was not a failing drive. I opened the cover to the SATA drive and hooked up the drive to my desktop. The desktop recognized the HDD and even booted to it. I reinstalled Windows 7 on the drive to ensure that it could be read and written to. Windows 7 installed correctly and was booted to and ran fine. Thinking that this might the issue (corruption I've seen can cause a PC to stall on boot up during POST) I reinstalled the SATA drive back into the laptop but to no avail, I received nothing and the laptop still refused to boot. Moving from the HDD to the RAM, I tried unloading and loading the RAM into different slots on the laptop but still no booting. Moving from the RAM to the battery, I tried removing and replacing the battery. No luck. Thinking it might still be a monitor problem, I hooked up a second LCD monitor to the VGA port on the side of the laptop. No response. This LCD monitor is the one I use for my desktop from which I'm typing this message. So I tried my luck with a RCT monitor. I also wanted to try this RCT monitor due to the fact that it told me when there was no cord signal. I turned on the monitor and indeed the "No Cord Signal" error (which I will be referring to it as such from now on) appeared. I plugged in the monitor to the laptop and the error vanished for a few seconds,then returned. Turning on the laptop returned the same results, a vanishing of the error then a returning of the error. Removing the cord produced the same results. This is when I began to worry that it might indeed be a mobo problem besides the past issues. I could also not get the sound to produce itself from either headset or built in speakers.
TL;DR: Pulled out HDD, placed in Desktop. HDD read. Reinstalled Windows 7 successfully and booted to said drive. Reinstalled drive to laptop with no results or booting to the drive. The drive still reads. No sound at all from the laptop other than hardware running from either built in speakers or headphones.. No booting from the DVD drive with bootable disc in. RAM switched into different spots, no response. Two working monitors placed into VGA port with no response upon booting.
ANY help at all would be appreciated. I would LOVE to get this powerful laptop up and running. :D
