Acer TravelMate 2355 and 290 (Episode 3)... Any advice please.

Hi there,

Please bear with me as this thread is a bit long (three in one)

Before I get to ask you (once again) for help, I sum up for you my story. A friend of mine poured by accident milk on his Acer TM 2355 and I'm traying to fix it for him. One of the chips on the motherboard has burning marks (Episode 1).

After searching the web for about a month I found that the Acer TM 2355 and TM 290 and the TM 4050 have more or less similar mobos. So, I found about a week ago an Acer TM 290 that was for sell as spare or repair because its display was fliking/blinking. I asked in the forum before buying it and I was told that it's either an inverter or and LCD issue and the mobo is probably OK (Episode 2).

I bought the Acer TM 290 which was delivered to me two days ago. The laptop was bought with three missing parts: LCD, HardDrive and mini pci wifi card. So the TM 290 has all the plastics, mobo, keyboard, battery, CPU, LCD inverter, optical drive, wifi antenna and 256mb of ram. The TM 290 and TM 2355 mobos are alike except the TM 290 one has infra red, firewire and a TV-out connection.

So, I planned to take the mobo from the TM 290 and place it in the TM 2355...I hate the engineers from ACER... Although the mobos are physically identical, the display connections in both mobos are different, the inverters are different too. And finaly due to the additional firewire and the TV-out the MT 290 mobo wont fit in the TM 2355 without chassis modification (making holes in the back for the TV-out and the firewire).
I'm still smilling at this stage... Change in the plan, instead of fitting the TM 290 mobo on the TM 2355 chassis, I decided to take the LCD from the 2355 and use it in the TM 290 (swapping around the invertors). So far so good. About an hour later, I had a full Acer TM 290 in front of me (Episode 3).

So, here is where I need help/advice. The laptop turns one, the LCD stays black, the cpu fun turns for 5-10 seconds, the hardrive LED stays ON... It's like the the laptop (TM 290) is hanging. Out of about 30 restarts I manage to boot the laptop three times and enter the BIOS. I stripped the laptop to the minimum (just mobo, CPU, harddrive and memory) and I got similar result out of 10, 15 restarts i manage to boot only once. I did not notice any specific pattern that may give clues to why the laptop doesn't want to start (boot).

Note that the CPU used for testing is from the Acer TM 2355 and was test and is fully working. It's a Celeron M 360 and it's compatible with both the TM 290. The harddrive is from my own laptop and is fully working. The memory is from my own laptop too.

So pleaaaaaaaaase help... Is it the mobo?
Thanks

 

Hmmm appears to be so. as long as the components you have used are all in working order prior to moving them. can u move them out and test them elsewhere? perhaps a bios update is in order? does the hard drive even start loading the OS? have you tried using a recovery partition or CD? perhaps using an external drive can eliminate the hard drive or OS as the problem and also save u from going thru a format for nothing. maybe even a BIOS update could help or resetting the CMOS or whatever laptops use for that.

 

thanks for the quick reply

yes I did and no improvment

yes on the few occasions (3-4 times) when the laptop wanted to boot
You see the window screen after that the laptop restart because the HDD is from my own working laptop (Evo 1015).

1- I dont have either of them
2- most of the time the laptop wont POST

A laptop with no optical drive and no harddrive should at least post, isn't it?

can't boot to do that.

I already did that

Please more suggestions...

 

Please, should I start hunting for another mobo?
thanks