M17x R4 No POST.... anchor for small boat?

The story - Sudden death! Was working fine until it was shut down and then re-powered.

When powered on, only a blank white screen and 8 beep code. Reset everything (yes, removed coin cell and all power). Reseated GPU card. Reseated CPU. Reseated ALL Ram. Even reseated display connector at MB. Now, for the bios beep code, Dell indicates LCD problem! Wow, I've never seen a display problem cause such a problem as no post! This is with or without GPU installed, and with and without external displays attached. External displays are blank black screens, not blank white screen. Okay, so if the LCD is bad, disconnecting it should allow post to get past display test... Nope. Only time anything happens other than the 8 beeps is immediately after clearing cmos settings, at which time it only does 5 beeps, which checks out.

Anyone seen anything like this? As it is (just) 18 months old, it made it past Dell's warranty period. Limited budget here for buying spare parts for trial and error repair. Any help is appreciated!

Thanks.

 

I got the dreaded 8 beep, and an LCD and motherboard did not fix it, as most people would tell you. What did fix it was a replacement video card. Luckily, my system was only a few months old when it happened, so was covered. I won't swear that's the problem, but Dell told me that they had a lot of 8 beepers and the majority ended up being vid cards, after they had sent out many lcd's and motherboards trying to chase the problem. (8 beeps says LCD in the dell beep list)

 

8 beep means bad LCD OR no display (doesn't tell you exactly why) detected/connected. Like I had a Dell where it was dropped, it had no video and it was beeping. The LVDS connector was slightly loose, and we reconnected it and it worked perfectly.

 

As suggested above, it could also be the video card. Did you get any video errors before this happened?

 

If you do not have the 120hz model you can simply remove the NV card to see if it will start on the iGPU.

As said 8 beeps is actually the whole video sub-system including the panel (end-to-end test).

 

This happens even when the video card is not installed. The laptop should still boot using the integrated Intel video, it that not correct?

 

I think if you take the video card out, you have to move the LCD connector to the other port (looking at the screen, it would be the one on the right). To do this, you have to take the kb cover and kb off to get to it.

 

Yes, as long as you do not have a 120hz/3D model. If it still happens then my money is on the MB (or the CPU where the iGPU is inside) . The LCD could indeed be bad but it's very unusual to fail POST, when they go bad it's visual issues.

You could try a reseat of the CPU...

 

The two connectors are for 60hz or 120hz output and have different connectors. Only NV cards can POST at 120hz so dell came up with a rewire to make the iGPU invisible to the hardware and allow it to boot with a native 120hz display. It's not multi-mode so it will not display a signal @ 60hz until a driver is loaded.

 

Why does (for the lack of any understanding on my part) Dell suggest to disable FLEX in the overclocking menu as their means to fix 8 beeps, when switching from SG to PEG. Anyone understand it ?

 

First time I've heard of that option -