Dead cf-30

Hi
I picked up a cf-30 at the auction this week. No hard drive or optical drive but has HD caddy and 1gb ram and battery.
Anyway after charging it for a while I turn it on and the lights below the touchpad flash for a second and the green power light stays on but that is it. No boot to bios and not a flicker or anything on the screen.
This should still boot to bios without a harddrive right?
I took the ram chip out and tried it and same thing. Will these boot to bios without the chip or do they need to have a memory chip to power up? I don't have another the same to try so thought I would ask here before getting one.
Any other ideas or did I lose my bet? Do the motherboards die on these very often?
thanks
Randy

 

Connect it to an external monitor. Perhaps the screen is busted/wiring loose. I'm not familiar with this model so i dunno about onboard ram. But crack it open and check all the wires. I sat with my mates CF-28 for three hours before i realized that the power button was loose.

 

tried the external monitor, nothing.

 

Well, according to the specs there is no onboard ram. Meaning it wont run without any ram modules. Now the ram module might be faulty, but i've come across the problem you described in the past. In that case the cpu was installed incorrectly. It wasn't fastened onto the mobo so to speak. And as far as i know the CF-30 has a socketed cpu, so you might wanna check that also.

Screen - check
Ram - try a known good module.
CPU - make sure its installed correctly alt. try a known good cpu.
GPU/Graphics - you're buggered.

 

The CF-30 CPU is soldered to the MB.

 

Right... Ta, mate.

randymac: Disregard my earlier statement.

 

tried a new ram chip, nothing, got it part way apart now , was hoping it was a socketed cpu, dam.

 

db04.., Already told you it is soldered and i am confirming that too. The best way to troubleshoot is to start from the basic. Take out all the ad on hardware and just let one ram at a time when power it on.

ohlip

 

Yea I started to open it up before reading the post about the soldered cpu.
I haven't gotten too far - removed keyboard, gps bt angle and wireless card.
still nothing- tried with a new dimm module- nothing- tried with and without harddrive, tried external monitor all- nothing.

One thing I mentioned before was the indicator lights below the touchpad flash for a second when you turn it on. If it was the screen or GPU wouldn't some like the drive light stay on or at least for a while while it tried to boot?
With a hard drive in and your ear to the case you can hear the drive start to spin up for a second and then stop. I'm no expert but it seems to me to be pointing to the motherboard or cpu.

Not a lot of parts for cf-30 on ebay yet. Would it be worth pulling the motherboard and sending it somewhere to get checked and or repaired? any suggestions where?
Or any suggestions what else to try first?
Bear in mind I'm no laptop tech but am fairly handy and can take direction. Have resurrected a couple of cf-28's

 

It seems to me based on your account but its hard to pin point really without seing it physically for confirmation is that maybe your bios is corrupt like trying to reflash the bios by somebody but failed or disrupted during the process.

Can you post the exact model of yours.

ohlip

 

Its a cf30 CTQAZBT-B