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Laptop doesn't boot

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by djuro.dmitrovic

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I have a laptop Sony VAIO, model PCG-9D6L. It has never been connected to the Internet (to rule viruses out). It runs its default Windows XP Home.
A week after extended warranty ran out it started freezing up if left on idle. No commands were responding. The only way to get it going was to keep power button pressed until dies and then reboot. If left 5 minutes on idle it would freeze again. Otherwise it worked fine. Then, after a while it started showing bootup problem. I press power button, power LED ligths up, then HD ligt comes up and after couple of second HD light dies. Power light stays on, but the machine never reached BIOS or anything else. The screen was entirely black. I tried external monitor but without luck. Nothing ever showed up on the screen.
While HD light is up I can hear HD running but after that it dies. Occassionally it boots up but freezes up right after that. Sometimes it freezes while showing me screen with Safe mode boot to chose, sometimes shows BSOD, but goes straight into reboot before I can even read what does it say on BSOD.
On one of rare occassions when it worked fine I defragmented HD and run Fdisk and CheckDisk. None of them found anything. I tried to disconnect power cord and boot it on batteries but that didn't work neither. It shows battery light normally, but it doesn't boot.
Any idea what could I do to find out what the problem is? Maybe motherboard battery went dry? How could I know?
How to bypass black screen?

HELP!

5 replies

by hal 9000

Well this really sounds like a Hardware problem and the only real way to solve it is to get a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD and persevere with it until you can get it to boot off the CD and run some diagnostics.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

But to be honest Note Books being Note Books have a hard life and do tend to die fairly quickly if the battery is still OK I would really be looking at the M'Board as a possible problem here with an Intermittent one of the hardest faults to fix really. Of course if you take it back to Sony they may have of had a [b]Bad Batch[/b] of M'Boards and change t over without question or they may charge you for it. Here it really depends on how [b]Honourable[/b] the company that you brought it from is.

They may have sent out a Call Back for Faulty Product that covers your NB or it could just be [b]The Luck of the Draw[/b] and your's has died a natural death.

Col

by mjd420nova

This sounds like a converter for the power supply
that is on it's last legs, and finally dying.
I've not been into a VAIO so I don't know if this circuit is on a board of it's own or is part of the MOBO. Also, a very dirty unit can
cause these types if power supply intermittents.

by davidr

You might try replacing the RAM. I've had similar issues on pc's where the RAM goes bad and then the pc won't even boot to POST.

Otherwise the previous diagnosis of MB is probably correct.

by djuro.dmitrovic

Thank you all guys for effort to help me out. I need some spare parts (RAM or power supply) to test your advices. Unfortunately by the time I test everything with (new) spare parts I might already spend enough money to buy a new machine. :-)
It is interesting that I also thought of Power supply and RAM as the first suspects but Sony's power bar is 19.5 V and very few other ones would fit. I'll try to get somewhere spare RAM to try that out. Thanks for letting me know that RAM might be the cause for this problem. I never heard of that before but I did think it might be the reason.

Thanks a lot to all of you that replied.

by ashily24dee

Hi,

Unplug the power supply. Remove the battery. Press the power button and hold it for 10 seconds. Now, plug the power supply back in, and without installing the battery, press the power button and see if it boots.
FWIW, if you are not going to use your computer for several hours, as in your case, it is far better to turn the computer off versus letting it sleep. Sleep is meant for short periods. If you do not wish to turn it off, consider enabling hibernation and hibernating the unit instead. Your best option, though, is to turn the computer off when you go to bed. Sleep mode does maintaing power to the system, and data corruption can occur (which is probably what happened in your case).

Get more information to fix HP laptop not booting :

http://supportforhp.iyogi.com/laptop-not-booting.html???

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