Another Dead Averatec 2370

Hello All,

My Averatec 2370 just bit the dust few weeks ago. The blue lights (power on & Wifi) turn on but everything else is dead (LCD,fan, hard drive, etc.) I noticed that when the blue lights are on that the Processor gets warm, so I assume processor is still alive. After trying different things and reading online I think the motherboard is dead. I am trying to find the motherboard for a reasonable price. After googling around I was able to find the exact model # for the Mobo its #82+8A2600+00 the cheapest working one I can find is $350

Does anyone know where I could get this cheaper? I already looked on ebay, cragslist.

AV 2370 was a renamed MSI model does anyone know what the corresponding MSI model is?

Note: I know that Averatec 2260 mobo #82+8A2200+00 and Averatec 2371 mobo#82+8A2600+01 would fit this laptop (except for 2260 I need different type of processor) As well as Averatec 2460 #unknown (2460 had an intel processor and was not released in the US)

Any help is appreciated.
Thanks.

 

These peoples carry some refurbished parts for the Averatec. Give them a shout:

http://www.laptopking.com/searhbrandresults.asp?brand=averatec

cheers ...

 

Thanks for the link, but I am over this thing. It's not worth fixing. I actually just ordered HP dm3z to replace it. If anyone interested I will sell the parts for the laptop or if you need a high capacity battery for it.

Thanks.

 

I am more than ever convinced it is the lousy GPU cooling design that kills these notebooks. After my cooling mod, my notebook has been running like a top for over a year.

 

Do you remember your post concerning the reformating of 3275 Averatec you posted a while back? I am curious if you can help me if I ran into issues torwards the end of the process? Let me know.

08-11-2007, 09:14 PM #4
Aeroplay
Notebook Enthusiast




Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 14
Rep Power: 6 Re: Create Recovery DVD from Recovery Partition

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Hello All, This is the link to the forum:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:...ient=firefox-a

In case you are wondering how I got this just google "averatec slax recovery"
And instead of opening the page just click on cache, and that will give a copy of the page retrieved at a previous date (aka before the hard drive crash ) and that’s how I can still read some of the old articles in there. All the links should be functional. About the slax program the only functional link is the Rapidshare one. I have used this method few days ago and it simple as turning on your PC. Just download the ISO image file, burn it onto a CD pop it in the CD drive in your Averatec and follow the simple instructions. I used it on my 2370 and it should work fine with other averatec lappys.

Disclamer: I did not write this fine article, and I do not take any credit for it. This article was copied and posted from www.averatecforums.com to benefit all members in this forum. Unfortunatly I did not take authorization from the original author “newhren” since I have no contact information about him, and I hope he doesn’t mind Ohh one more thing use at your own risk.

Copying Start:
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How I created a recovery DVD for averatec 3270
This simple bootable CD (slax-fwrecover CD) will create a Recovery DVD (or a set of Recovery CD(s)) from your "hidden" Phoenix Recovery Partition. It should work on any averatec model. Simply put, it extracts the harddisk images, used by Phoenix FirstWare Recover Pro 2004 (the software which you start by pressing F4 during the boot), and burns them on a DVD (or on several CD(s)). Even if you messed up your MBR and "F4 during boot" no longer works, slax-fwrecover CD will work as long as you didn't delete the "hidden" partition.


1) First you will need to download the iso image of slax-fwrecover and burn it. This step can be done on any computer, not necesserarily on your averatec machine.

* Download the file slax-fwrecover.iso (MD5SUM 79474fb5e905cdb1804911bbefa9a7d8 ) from http://rapidshare.com/files/5525118/slax-fwrecover.iso, or from http://www.sendspace.com/file/tp7wyi, or from http://www.f-forge.com?d=eGXL4ZcfWKOh0Bv3obHj. This file is about 54Mb.

* Download DeepBurner Free from http://www.deepburner.com/, it is about 3Mb.

* Install DeepBurner, and use it to burn slax-fwrecover.iso to any writable CD or DVD disk (if it is a re-writable disk, you may first need to erase, or "blank" it).

2) Now we are ready to make Recovery DVD/CD(s). Note that not a single bit will be written to your hard-disk, everything will be done in the memory. You may turn off your averatec machine at any time, and you will be fine.

* Insert slax-fwrecover CD you've just made into the drive and reboot your averatec machine. It will boot from this slax-fwrecover CD. It will take some time to copy the contents of the CD into the memory (2-3 minutes). Dont disturb the machine. Once it is done, it will eject the CD.

* If your Phoenix Partition is not corrupted, you will see a prompt asking if you want to burn a DVD or several CD(s). Obviously one DVD is better. But some Averatecs can't burn DVD's (e.g. av1020 and av1050). If you want a DVD, answer DVD, if you want a set of several CD's, answer CD (for most Averatecs it will be 3 CD's).

* Again, dont disturb the machine. Just insert the empty disk(s) when prompted. Burning time for one DVD or one CD is about 10 minutes. If you are burning several CD's, remember their order (write 1, 2, 3 ... on them with a permanent marker).


To recover, simply insert the Recovery DVD or the first Recovery CD into the tray and reboot the machine. It will erase all data on your harddrive (including the "hidden" partition), and will recover your Windows partition to the factory-shipped state. If you used a Recovery CD, sometime during the process you will be asked to insert the next CD's.


Note: If your CD-drive can't burn DVD's (e.g. if you have av1020 or av1050), and you've made Recovery CD's but would like to have a single Recovery DVD, then you can do so on another machine (with a DVD burner) as per described in http://averatecforums.com/showpost.php?p=29353.

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Technical details:

The only difference between slax-fwrecover.iso and the origianal file slax-frodo-5.1.6.iso (available at slax.org) is that the former contains an additional file modules/fwrecover.mo and has some changes in the start-up scripts as described in http://averatecforums.com/showpost.php?p=28880. The file fwrecover.mo is a squashfs-image of fwrecover.tgz. I have been very carefull to include into this file only free open-source software, which is either licensed under GNU GPL, or is just plain freeware. It contains a bootable FreeDOS floppy-image (with CD-ROM drivers and fdisk), a small utility fwfind which I wrote myself, and a bash-script fwrecover which does the job. The executable fwfind has been statically linked (that's why it is so big!), so you can use fwrecover.mo with any other version of Slax, and you can also use fwrecover.tgz with any other live Linux (it has to support loop-back devices and include DVD-writing utility growisofs and/or CD-writing utility cdrecord).

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Copying Ends.

I hope this helps.

Aeroplay
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08-12-2007, 12:23 PM #5
sam313
Newbie


Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 3
Rep Power: 0 Re: Create Recovery DVD from Recovery

 

Hey fengx, Sorry for the late reply I didn't notice your post untill now.

About creating the recovery disk for your Averatec, I used the same described method and everything worked fine. Let me know what you need help with. I am going through finals right now so my reply might be slow.

 

Why waste $350 or less on anything as unpredictable as an Averatec, check out tigerdirect.com.

 

Overheating was brutal on these laptops. Combined with bad design on part of the nVidia MCP Chipset, and early-days lead-free bga spheres? Nightmare in design. I still see a TON of these where I work, still coming in for the same NPNV (No Post/No Video) issues.

If you have the hardware, or know a shop that can do it, a reflow of the Northbridge BGA will return your board to life. Fixes like this typically cost around $60-$100, and there's quite a few people offering that sort of thing on eBay, last I bothered to check.

 

I've been following these posts about problems with the Averatec 2370 for a couple years now, but I never participated. I've been fighting with my "sleeping Averatec" for even longer, but I'm finally deciding to either make it work correctly, or replace it - it's taken me a LONG time to come to grips with this since I really like this laptop when it's working.

Anyway, I know most of you have probably moved on by now, but mine is up an running again and I was wondering if anyone had any advice on how to keep it that way.

Just to beat the dead horse a little more - here's what mine did:

- Running the original AMI BIOS version R1.04 with build date 09/13/06 from what I can tell (I forgot how few options there were in there)
- If you closed the lid while it was on it would not come out of sleep. I think it would actually shut down, but when you hit power again you get the DVD/CD drive spin-up, power and WiFi lights, quick flash of the HD LED... and that's it. I'd need to hold power down for 5 seconds to get it to shut off.
- I think there were other times when it would also go into this state, but this was the only reliable way that it would happen.
- Processor would get hot if I left it in this state.
- When this happened, I used to turn it on and repeatedly eject and then load a CD or DVD in the optical drive so that it would spin up. After about 10 times of doing this and letting it spin for about 5 minutes each time, I would hold power for 5 seconds to shut down, then immediately hit power again, and it would boot.
- Shortly before this started happening, my output to an external monitor failed. I remember it being temperamental for a little while, then one day - nothing. Also, running that monitor at a resolution higher than the laptop LCD really heated the GPU up - I used to monitor it with the tools in Ubuntu.
- Also, I've almost always run Ubuntu on it.

I hadn't turned the thing on for about a year (someone closed the lid, it went to sleep, the optical drive thing didn't work, and I lost patience). But two days ago I decided to give it one more go before I start selling parts or scrapping it. It was following the typical pattern and I was checking things with my multimeter, but I forgot about it for most of my work day (powered on with just the power and WiFi). I'd been trying to boot it repeatedly the previous day without success, but yesterday, after leaving it on for about 8 hours (oh, I had also unplugged the LCD, fan, battery connector, keyboard - it was basically just laptop guts strung together on a table getting hot) I held power to turn it off and then powered right back on, and it booted. I didn't see any difference in voltage on that battery everyone talks about or at the DC jack or anywhere else I randomly checked (and it WAS pretty random at one point). At that point, I plugged everything back in, still haven't screwed anything back together, and it's working fine. BIOS clock said 01/01/2002, though. I had shorted that battery at some point, and I assume that's what reset the clock, but I didn't see any connection between that battery and booting properly. I think it was letting it sit there with power on for a long time that did it.

I haven't closed the lid since then, but that brings me back to all the old posts I stopped reading about a year ago. So does anyone have any thoughts on keeping it running? I may just turn the thing into a digital picture frame (I really like that glossy widescreen), but I'll need to be sure it reliably boots, restarts, etc. Thanks for any help you can give.

Oh, and I hope the trip down memory lane didn't raise anyones blood pressure too much. ;-)