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Author Topic: Is my laptop bricked?  (Read 4909 times)

zahc

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Is my laptop bricked?
« on: February 05, 2011, 06:54:52 PM »
My Acer Aspire one is not showing many signs of life. When I press the button, the power button LED lights up and the fan cycles on, and seems like the fan switches between high mode and medium mode and it just does that. No BIOS screen. No flicker from the screen. No HDD light. Pressing Caps Lock doesn't make the Caps Lock LED light. Bricked? Is there some way to reset a BIOS?
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Jim147

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #1 on: February 05, 2011, 06:56:44 PM »
You can try pulling both batteries. But I'm not sure if you have to take that one all the way apart to get to the little battery.

jim
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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #2 on: February 05, 2011, 08:12:07 PM »
FWIW, that sounds similar to symptoms observed in some HP laptops a few years back.  Some of the BGA chipset or video subsystem chips were working loose due to high internal heat.  HP extended the warranty on several different laptop models because of that, replaced a lot of motherboards.
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GigaBuist

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #3 on: February 05, 2011, 08:13:15 PM »
Did you do anything that might have damaged it?  That's usually helpful in diagnosing this stuff. :)

Bad RAM might do that.  Might.  If you can I'd pull some RAM chips and see if at least gets you to the BIOS screen.  If it does then you've found your culprit.
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zahc

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #4 on: February 05, 2011, 08:29:54 PM »
No idea how relevant all this info is, but, the full saga:

All was well with the cosmos. Upon a whim, I ran Ubuntu's updates, which may or may not have finished before I turned the computer off. I don't remember confirming that the update finished before turning off the computer. Sometimes one of those annoying license agreements pops up and won't let the updates continue unless you select "agree" or something, so I'm not sure if the updates finished.

When I rebooted, the system would hang at the login screen with the keyboard and trackpad locked out (the clock still incremented though). My only recourse was to force-power-cycle by holding down the power button. I was able to boot an old version of Ubuntu off another partition with no problems. I thought maybe there was a filesystem problem with my current partition and it was hanging when it tried to mount something, so I tried to boot a live USB image to run fsck. Multiple attempts to boot off a Live USB drive failed, and I tried several USB drives. Then I tried appending "single" to my Grub's boot options to boot into single-user mode and run fsck. That failed, and left me sitting at a blinking cursor. I power cycled the system again, and now it's apparently bricked.
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lee n. field

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #5 on: February 05, 2011, 08:41:24 PM »
Quote from: RocketMan on February 05, 2011, 08:12:07 PM
FWIW, that sounds similar to symptoms observed in some HP laptops a few years back.  Some of the BGA chipset or video subsystem chips were working loose due to high internal heat.  HP extended the warranty on several different laptop models because of that, replaced a lot of motherboards.

It wasn't just several, it was a bunch of HP laptops, with a bunch of symptoms.

Quote
Upon a whim, I ran Ubuntu's updates, which may or may not have finished before I turned the computer off. I don't remember confirming that the update finished before turning off the computer. Sometimes one of those annoying license agreements pops up and won't let the updates continue unless you select "agree" or something, so I'm not sure if the updates finished.

Extremely unlikely that an Ubuntu update did this.  My E-machines is essentially the same, and is chugging along fine.

Under warranty?
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Regolith

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #6 on: February 05, 2011, 09:04:51 PM »
Sounds like a dead processor.
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zahc

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #7 on: February 06, 2011, 12:27:43 AM »
Quote
Extremely unlikely that an Ubuntu update did this.

I agree, but due to the hangage that ensued after the update, I was having to power-cycle the thing repeatedly, which might have been what caused it to go south.

I guess there is a procedure to re-flash the Aspire one BIOS, but I'm not sure if it's something that would run if the machine doesn't even show the BIOS screen. In any case I'll have to rip the thing apart and pull the HDD out to save my data. This machine is my portable microcontroller programmer, so all my code is stuck on it.
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CNYCacher

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #8 on: February 06, 2011, 12:59:23 AM »
Quote from: zahc on February 06, 2011, 12:27:43 AM
I agree, but due to the hangage that ensued after the update, I was having to power-cycle the thing repeatedly, which might have been what caused it to go south.

I guess there is a procedure to re-flash the Aspire one BIOS, but I'm not sure if it's something that would run if the machine doesn't even show the BIOS screen. In any case I'll have to rip the thing apart and pull the HDD out to save my data. This machine is my portable microcontroller programmer, so all my code is stuck on it.

They make adapter kits that will convert any loose HD into a USB external for data recovery.  They run about $30 on amazon  If you are buying a new lappy, snag the kit now.
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mtnbkr

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #9 on: February 06, 2011, 07:21:23 AM »
Quote from: CNYCacher on February 06, 2011, 12:59:23 AM
They make adapter kits that will convert any loose HD into a USB external for data recovery.  They run about $30 on amazon  If you are buying a new lappy, snag the kit now.

If you have a Microcenter nearby, they frequently have them for as little as $10.

Chris
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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #10 on: February 06, 2011, 12:24:09 PM »
Quote from: mtnbkr on February 06, 2011, 07:21:23 AM
If you have a Microcenter nearby, they frequently have them for as little as $10.

Chris

BTDT.  Not something for long-term use, though.
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Brad Johnson

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #11 on: February 06, 2011, 12:43:13 PM »
Sounds more like you have a BIOS problem than anything.  If it was the processor you should get a failure code generated by the bootup self-checks.  You say it's hanging at the cursor.  Will it let you get into BIOS before it goes to the cursor screen?  Download the latest BIOS updates that will let you generate a bootable CD.  Pull the HD and see if will boot and possibly reflash the BIOS.

Brad
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erik the bold

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #12 on: February 06, 2011, 03:41:22 PM »
Have you tried plugging it in to an external monitor?

Possibly the LED backlight  has failed.......
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Brad Johnson

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #13 on: February 06, 2011, 03:52:36 PM »
Quote from: erik the bold on February 06, 2011, 03:41:22 PM
Have you tried plugging it in to an external monitor?

Possibly the LED backlight  has failed.......

Not if he can see the cursor blinking on the screen.

Brad
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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #14 on: February 06, 2011, 05:02:36 PM »
Loose fan belt on the search engine.








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GigaBuist

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Re: Is my laptop bricked?
« Reply #15 on: February 07, 2011, 09:36:37 AM »
Quote from: erik the bold on February 06, 2011, 03:41:22 PM
Have you tried plugging it in to an external monitor?

Not a bad suggestion.  I had that happen once.  Laptop looked darned near dead, but it'd boot up, toss up some kind of error message, and the screen would go blank.

I ended up grabbing a video camera to capture the error message, determined that it was indeed alive, and the error wasn't critical, and used an external monitor to fix the underlying issue.

Never did fix the display though.
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