Laptop won't start

[Gusty987]

Hey guys, I have a Uniwill 258ka5 laptop. Recently it hasn't been starting at all. When I press the power button the lights light up and the fans spin up normally but nothing appears on the screen. I then tried hooking up the laptop to a separate monitor but nothing ever appeared there either. It will continue to run with the fans going until I hold the power button down for several seconds to shut it down. Any ideas what could be causing this issue?

 

[Yowen]

Do the lights come on in a certain pattern? Sometimes those are error codes.

I am afraid no screen, even with a monitor means a dead motherboard in a lot of cases. Which is so expensive to replace that it isn't worth it.

maybe try leaving the battery out of it for a while and starting it up.

Or try different configurations of your ram, sometimes that goes bad and prevents it from starting up.

Do you hear harddrive activity?

 

[SirGeeO]

Could be the screen itself.... I replaced 2 different screens on 2 different laptops before. Same kind of incident, could be wrong though.

 

[Yowen]

Could be the screen itself.... I replaced 2 different screens on 2 different laptops before. Same kind of incident, could be wrong though.

Unlikely as a monitor doesn't work either. Those sometimes need to be turned on via the keyboard or the display properties though, thats why i am curious about harddrive activity.

 

[Gusty987]

Thanks for the replies. I opened up the laptop and for some reason the CMOS battery wasn't there! I have an old one which is only putting out about 1.2 volts out of 3 which I put in but still nothing on the screen. Still, though, I thought that without CMOS I would still see a POST screen right?

Also, I'm pretty sure there is no hard drive activity.

For the lights, when I turn it on, the whole row of indication lights turns on for a split second, then they turn off, then the HDD activity light blinks 5 times, then they all turn off and only the power button light stays on.

 

[Yowen]

google doesnt seem to know much about this laptop, maybe your manual has some information on possible error codes?

no CMOS battery is weird... I suppose the laptop would still work though, just the settings would get reset every time it looses power.

At this point, in my case, when these things were happening. No hdd, no screen, just fan spinning, my mobo was dead. Which I was able to see by means of the error codes my laptop gave me and looking them up.

 

[MichaelD]

The CMOS battery is probably soldered to the MB on the other side of the MB. If the laptop is old, it is possible that it will not boot with a dead MB battery. There HAS TO be a CMOS battery of some type in order for the laptop to retain time/boot settings/etc.

The fact that you get no video at all, even with an external monitor is troubling. I would try to find that CMOS battery and temporarily rig in a AAA battery to supplement it and see what happens. The things' already "dead"; it's experimentation time now.

 

[lobbyone]

Interesting, my DV6045nr shows a similar symptom as it would not post often but stay on. After cleaning the heatsink and using a new thermal compound on all the chips, it started to post fine. Have you tried cleaning the inside of your laptop?

 

[Gusty987]

Ok so I have now replaced the CMOS battery, replaced the BIOS chip, replaced the CPU, and moved the RAM sticks around, still nothing ever comes up on screen.

 

[Decembermouse]

I'm sorry dude, it sounds like the motherboard is dead...