Travelmate 8204 MASSIVE failure issue

My travelmate 8200 has lost its mind:

a) laptop would reboot on its own, no reason. i thought maybe it was heat related.
b)stopped using laptop in bed, or other places that heat might be problem, kept on stable surfaces.
c)backed up everything, formatted drives, reinstalled OS, reinstalled major software.
d)worked for a few weeks.
e) one day stopped booting altogether

NOW:
1) Boot will get through initial setup and show a screen that reads
"...missing hll.dll, please reinstall..." (file name may be wrong, begins with "h" though)

2) If I enter the BIOS and change the boot to CD first, then reboot:

3) CD spins, and laptop resets, over and over again till I cut power (or hit power button)

4) I've tried all the standard power related fixes (hold down power, battery out, etc... etc..

5) Once, after removing all power, and removing the ram, replacing it and rebooting, I actually made it to windows, backed up some of new files, ran e-recovery... wehn the laptop restarted to install fix.... back to same problem of restart over and over again.

6) at some point after dozens of reboots, acer e-recovery began to boot!! (I don't remember what I may have done differently.. I think I sneezed), 80% of the way to completion, the A/C cord was tripped, and shutdown (#&^*!)

7) this is when the .dll problem screen started showing up (but, there was a .dll error message when the boot problem first started, just in a different context, it was not specifically called out, it was more an error at the end of a string of date.)

8) Now, for some reason, I get nothing but a black screen, hard drive light does not come on at all, the fan runs. I have a nice heater.

help me. or so help me I will sledge hammer this machine.

 

addition to section 7) the old reference was in the context of a boot screen that asked me if I wanted to boot in safe mode, network mode, last windows boot etc... any of these options would result in the power reseting
6) I do remember, I held down the green acer "e" button while booting. doesn't do anything anymore.

 

Just to clarify, when you try to boot a Windows XP install CD from the CD drive, the laptop just reboots over and over again?

 

It seems to me the notebook has a real big hardware problem. I would guess that the harddrive and/or the optical drive has a problem. You can use the bios normaly? Have you tried to boot by diskette or usb stick?

 

a buddy of mine had the exact same problem but with an aspire series notebook. turns out that it was something with the hard driver controller on the mobo. which ended up frying his hard drive and messing up his mobo as well. but he ended up buying a new one after he "fixed" his old laptop with a sledgehammer.

 

if booting from boot CD doesn't work, you have a hardware problem, obviously. or the boot CD is broken, you could try the Ubuntu live CD to make sure.

from the symptoms, I would guess it's the motherboard. or hard drive controller on the mobo, same thing really for the purposes of fixing - you just need a new mobo. it could be RAM too but RAM doesn't just suddenly stop working. motherboards have many capacitators and other electronics which actually can blow up and/or stop working.

are you under warranty? can you get extended warranty? my 8204 has 3 years warranty so i think there must be a way to get extended warranty...

 

Have you tried using one memory module then the other, or with some for another laptop ? First thing I would do is testing the ram, try memtest, the version that can be grabbed to a bootable cd... then if cpu is easyly removable try with another one. If this could help...