No power to laptop

[Dood]

Compaq presario 2190US, working last night, this morning I noticed none of the lights were on. Charging and batt. lights are off, does not respond to power switch. I tested the power supply with a voltmeter and it's putting out 18 volts, which it's rated for, pulled the battery and it's fully charged. Plugged it in without the battery, still nothing. Pushed the reset on the bottom, nothing, put battery back in, nothing. I'm thinking a short in a cd drive or hard drive, or on the mobo. Any other thoughts?

[ThreeOnTheTree]

Hmm, a Gateway notebook I had for a brief time did that. Nothing I did could get it working, and that included trying different hard drives. If you aren't getting it to do anything (no lights even), then it is very likely a motherboard problem.

[Dood]

That's what I'm afraid of, dead mobo.
Here's what I've tried:
There are a few files that I really need on that drive so
I took the hard drive out of the Compaq and stuck it in an older Dell inspiron 2500 with I think an 800mhz PIII and 256 meg ram but it won't load windows, not even in safe mode. Tried using an XP boot disk with the drive in the Dell but get the same error message, and a WinME boot disk to command prompt doesn't show the hard drive. I also tried booting the Dell using a Knoppix 4.0 CD which boots up, but again does not show my hard drive. The drive does show up in the the BIOS. I've been able to access damaged drives with Knoppix in the past. Ideas? Dead hard drive?

[ThreeOnTheTree]

Well, if you are able to boot with a bootable CD, then the board is likely fine. I was under the impression that it was completely lifeless. If you can boot to a CD and everything is setup, then it is very likely that the HDD is going bad. You can find out for sure if you buy a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter. It would allow you to hook your notebook drive up to a standard motherboard. From there, you can see if a known working system can doing anything with it. The adapters are pretty cheap. Even places like CompUSA sell them for less than $10.

[Dood]

Well, if you are able to boot with a bootable CD, then the board is likely fine. I was under the impression that it was completely lifeless.


It is, I stuck the Compaq drive into a Dell and used Knoppix cd to boot the Dell. The Compaq is dead.
From my previous post:
I took the hard drive out of the Compaq and stuck it in an older Dell inspiron 2500 with I think an 800mhz PIII and 256 meg ram but it won't load windows, not even in safe mode...

You can find out for sure if you buy a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter. It would allow you to hook your notebook drive up to a standard motherboard. From there, you can see if a known working system can doing anything with it. The adapters are pretty cheap. Even places like CompUSA sell them for less than $10.

That's a good idea, since I had to boot Knoppix in failsafe to get it working on the Dell, so it may not be seeing the drive because of that.

One other thing, I noticed that the drive from the Compaq had a jumper block going horizontally across 2 of the 4 pins on the end of it but the Dell drive did not, could that be a problem?

[Dood]

Ok, got Knoppix to see the drive. I had to boot knoppix with the nodma option and that allowed it to see the drive, so I guess the drive is ok. At least I can get files off it using Linux.
I suppose the drive couldn't load WinXP properly in the Dell because it was configured to load on the Compaq?

[DanceMan]

You can get the files off in Windows if the drive is working by connecting it to a desktop computer using the adapter Tott mentioned. You might need to change the jumpers on the drive from Master to Slave, depending on how you're connecting it.
As for the difference in jumpers, you'd have to get the exact jumper data for both drives from the drive manufacturers' websites. They'll be different for different brands, which probably accounts for the differences you noted.

[Dood]

Ok, I'm at the point where I'm about to tear the laptop down all the way to the motherboard. Assuming that's my problem, will I have to get a replacement from Compaq, or are there interchangeable boards available as with desktops?

[DanceMan]

No, they're specific to the notebook. There are a limited number of actual manufacturers that supply everyone, like Quanta and Compal, but they don't deal with consumers. So you're down to getting it from Compaq or ebay.

[Dood]

I noticed there are a number of people selling just the power input socket that is soldered to the motherboard, so I'm hoping that might be the problem as I can see how that would be a weak link.

[Dood]

Just thought I'd update. Got a used mobo off Ebay, installed it, and I'm up and running :D
The board cost me $250 inc. shipping, but also had the same processor and heatsink already installed so I guess it wasn't a bad deal.

[DanceMan]

Congrats. That's a pretty adventurous undertaking. Glad it worked out for you.

[Dood]

Yeah I was a bit nervous about the whole deal, especially if I did all this and it didn't work, I wouldn't really know if the new board were bad too or if it were something else, but I felt I had eliminated other possibilities. The actual job was pretty straight forward, keep track of all the screws and make sure you have them all out before you pull too hard on anything. :eek:

On a slightly related note, I've seen some people here talk about bad experiences with notebookforums.com. I actually got some good info from them on this one, so they aren't all bad, as long as you don't criticize a sponsor I guess ;)