CF-W2 Boot Problem

I've always had a soft spot for W series Toughbooks and came across one on E-Bay for a low price. Bought it and fired it up after charging the battery for a while. It booted up to an unactivated copy of XP with no drivers. Given that it was in excellent condition, 768 Ram and 40gb drive I decided to put it aside and order a Panasonic recovery disk from MyRecoveryCds.com . Got the dvd, loaded it into the W2 (model is a Mark 4 CF-W2D), it ran the first part of the dvd, finished and the screen said, rebooting to install windows xp. That was the end of it, no lights, no battery charging light, power switch does nothing, can't open the cd drive, panasonic power supply reads ok with dvm..

Any suggestions............. Do I start dissaembling the laptop and look for a physical problem. I can't believe that a recovery cd would brick the entire machine just copying software on to it...

Thanks, Jim

 

I have other weird problems like this on other laptops. Try pulling the battery and extra ram to see if it would light up. If not it may be time to open the case.

 

Welcome to the Toughbook forum
Unless your Toughbook model is different I don't think you got a recovery disk...at least not like the one that Panasonic sells because the one that Panasonic sells takes only about 25-30 minutes to install and it is an image of the harddrive when it was new .

I have run into a lot of things but nothing like that. I would go with what ADOR said...good luck

 

A DVM does not put a load on the power supply. It just checks the voltage. Can you post a photo of the recovery disk?

 

Ok,
The power supply is happily supplying power to my CF-30, so I think that it's still functional and supplying power under load..
I love computers. Took the battery out, nothing, shook the computer, nothing, put the battery back in, nothing. Borrowed a W2 battery, put it in, it worked fine, started charging, finished booting up to windows, all drivers worked, logged on to my guest portal at home and started downloading XP updates.

Looks like the recovery CD is the genuine article.....



However, as soon as I shut the machine down, it refused to restart, no lights, no charge led, NOTHING. I looked at the damn thing, went and got the other battery, put it in, The damn thing started right up, indicating 99% charge. Shut it off, hit the restart, NOTHING, pulled the battery, waited 30 seconds put it back in and the charge light came on and everything was fine. shut it off. nothing, pulled the battery and it came back on normally...

Still confused.......

Jim

 

Recovery disk is for a mark 1 not mark 4...


Try starting it without any battery, then shut it down and restart still without a battery...

 

Shawn,

That's the other disk, at the time I took the picture, the Mark 4 disk was stuck in the machine until I could get it rebooted.. Interesting, it rebooted fine after I started it up, removed the battery and then shut it down without the battery in it. I repeated the process several times, put thebattery back in and it shut down and rebooted several times without failing. I'll let it sit a while and then try it again.

The confusion on the disks was I got two CF- W2 mark 1,s w/o drives (both boot to the bios, one a parts machine) for $15 and the Mark 4 for another $30 (complete 40gb and 768K). So I guess I've filled in my CF-Wx soft spot for a while. My law school student son has asked for one of them as he's tired of lugging his big HP to class.

I'll report back after a couple of days to see if it stays fixed.....

Thanks for your help, Jim