Possible problems that cause startup failure in 3200?

Ok.. Here's the deal.
About a week ago I spilled coffee on my wife's 3200 laptop. She never uses it, but I had planned on setting it up to use for some things.

I immediately unplugged the power and battery, and followed some online instructions on how to clean it and dry it.

However, after going through the painstaking task of pulling it apart, thoroughly rinsing it with distilled water, and letting it dry with a fan for a couple of days... I put it back together and tried to start it today. Uh oh...

So when I try to power it on, the led's light up and it acts like it's going to boot. Then it sounds as if the fan kicks in really high, and it suddenly crashes.

And it tries to do the whole thing again by itself, even if I try & power it off. I have to hold the power button down to make it stop, but as soon as I release it, it tried to boot up again.

I tried sticking a known, working, backup hard drive in to see if it was the disk. Same thing. I tried sticking in the recovery disks to see if it would boot from there... No go. Never even gets that far.

So I'm thinking the problem has to be something *other* than a hard drive failure.

What are the possible scenarios after a liquid spill?
Is the motherboard automatically the culprit, or could there be other things to try before I give up?

If it's the motherboard, I may go that route. I've seen them for about $150 on eBay from reputable sellers.

But if there's something else I could try before the motherboard, I'd welcome any advice.

Thanks so much!

 

Any BIOS warning beeps? If so, the pattern will give you a better clue.

I agree with your guess that most likely you have fried some aspect of the motherboard. Set your hard drive aside to protect your system. You should be able to boot to the BIOS setup with no hard drive installed.

Do you have any installed RAM modules? You can also try swapping them out. I can't remember if your model has any soldered in RAM. If so, obviously you can't swap that, but you don't need any other RAM installed to get to the BIOS setup.

BTW- real computer users only drink black coffee because there are fewer electrolytes to fry components when you spill

Jim Johnson
Serenity Consulting

 

Thanks for the response! I ordered a working 3200 motherboard on eBay, and it came today.
Put it all back together, and everything is back up & running!