Bricked Bios- Toshiba Satellite C855

I have a real doozy and if anyone can help me solve this I would be ever so grateful!
Situation:

I was asked to repair a Toshiba Satellite C855-S5355 laptop running Win.8. It had issues with the screen going black (hibernating) and then not waking up from sleep mode, the same would happen when the lid was closed, resulting in frequent hard shut downs. When I first got it I did all of the usual maintenance and clean up first and because I always make it a habit of doing this when I get a computer in, I also took a look in the event viewer and noticed page after page of errors regarding "the system time has changed" even though there were no changes made that could be physically seen. Another problem was when restarting it would randomly ask for a bios password even though none had been set. That would disappear after a couple of restarts. The problems rapidly got worse and eventually the machine would crawllllll to get to the login screen which would also frequently stay on a blank (but lit) screen until it eventually finished loading. (Hard drive checked out fine though) There was a bios update which specifically stated that it was for the "sleep mode" issue so I obviously ran the update. I did everything I was supposed to, made sure it was plugged in, battery was fully charged, blah blah blah. The bios did its thing and then shut down as planned but that was all she wrote. It appears to have no power whatsoever now but I know there is power going to the board because when I tried to do a wincrisis flash the USB will blink 1 time (and it will only do this when the battery is out) but then nothing. (Also, It is only one USB port of the 4 that works) No fan, no lights, zilch. I called Toshiba and they had the audacity to tell me that even though it was their bios update I shouldn't have run it. They said if I had called first they would've given me suggestions to fix the issues without the update...here's the kicker, the warranty expired in Nov so it will be $390....Another thing that I have already tried is the whole removing the CMOS battery thing and also rebooting it with the HDD and DVD drive removed. The motherboard has an Insyde sticker on it. Anybody have any thoughts? I really don't want to put a whole new board in if I can help it.

 

I have never had luck with Toshiba notebooks (never bought one; just experience from my clients). The last one I updated about two years ago (I was paid almost $1400 to bring it up to speed) died less than a month afterwards. I almost wanted to give back the money they had given me (but most of that was for recovering the data from the first failure it had before I fixed it up).

I would not be looking to spend $400 to fix a two year old system with three year old (SNB) technology.

If you can't get it working with a DOS boot disk (optical or USB) to try re-flashing the BIOS, time to start looking for another system.


Good luck.

 

Thank you for your reply. I personally will never own a toshiba either (even more so after this) but I do still need to get it up and running and back to the customer, which is why I am trying to flash the bios from USB. I'm just not sure I'm doing it properly. I did find a replacement MB for $140 but considering the PC belongs to a young college kid, I'd really like to go the other route first if at all possible.


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Oh, I see the situation better now. I still think the best is to cut any further losses and buy a new system.

Sorry, can't give any specific course of action for you to try and follow.

In similar situations, I have charged my minimum to the client, backed up their data to a $30 USB key/drive and gave the system back as is.

Some decided to get it fixed by a third party and almost all have come back and hinted they should have listened to 'buy new' instead. Most systems I know about last less than six to eight months after a 'fix' like this... right after the 90/180 day 'warranty' expired.

Do you have an old/similar system lying around to offer them (for the price of fixing their original)? I keep a couple like that to give away if the client's circumstances (students...) warrant it.

Good luck.

 

This seems like a hardware issue - at least if it started up but didn't POST because the BIOS was corrupted, you could restore it https://www.google.com/search?clien....9.0....0...1c.1.37.serp..4.5.367.lpdOqcPkEoA

I restored an Insyde BIOS by placing the properly renamed BIOS file (varies from laptop to laptop) on a USB drive, starting the laptop and waiting 10 minutes. It flashed and restored itself.

 

I believe that aqstech.com charges $99 bucks for this repair. Just another option.