My CF-27 has just died! Help!

It's not woman driver proof :'(
Mum made an emergency stop and toughbook fell on the floor.
He's a CF-27Mk2 (CF27E).
I power him up but he doesn't flash the "neomagic" thingy he usually does, he RAM tests for ages, then hangs. F2ing into the bios doesn't work.
If I remove the battery whilst he's booting, he flashes the neomagic but still ram tests. F2 gets into CMOS but asks for a password which I have never set. Still hangs at boot.
He just won't get past post :'(
Any help much appreciated, he's my favourite laptop.

 

He's booted! I kept on playing the battery removey thingey and he's running memtest as I type.
My CF-27 either doesn't have a cmos battery, or it's dead because if I remove the main battery for a minute or so, he'll give me CMOS errors.
Perhaps when he fell on the floor, the battery arced a tad and somehow wrote to the flash chip. By holding the power switch, and inserting the battery, then releasing and then flicking the power switch, his CMOS has been reset completely (it seems).
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he's going to be ok, and that he's going to keep his CMOS intact.

 

Could the CMOS battery have unplugged itself? I don't know the CF-27 but you might reconstruct the scene of the crash and consider in what attitude the impact occurred and there-by deduce if there was enough energy for an unplug scenario. Or it could have shaken a dying CMOS battery enough to cause it's demise. (I love words)
A tear down to check all the plugs would not be out of order.
Best wishes to him and his CMOS condition.

Jeff

 

n/m missed a line in OP

 

Thanks Jeff,
He's currently sitting on my bed happily squeaking away and serving webpages so he should be ok, I seem to have fixed him, with my fix above.
I've poked around to look for the CMOS battery whilst checking plugs but I couldn't see one at all. A quick peek at the service manual shows that there *should* be a battery (BT1) on the underside of the motherboard, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I also set a few values in the BIOS but he's not keeping them if the battery comes out.

I attempted to recreate the slide, which was basically sudden deceleration at 40mph and a fall onto the floor.

<THEORY>
When the accident happened, the handle of the toughbook was facing towards the left side, and as is slid it had an evil plasticy breakable laptop on top of the CF-27.
This pushed the handle end (front) of the toughbook towards the floor, which on impact, as the forces were pulling the battery down, disconnected the main battery for a tiny fraction of a seccond, but enough to cause partial corruption of the bios.
</THEORY>

I'm going to try making a insert for the small space in the battery compartment out of hard foam, to try and keep the battery from popping out on impact, I'll give it some testing, and (eventually) report my findings.
I seriously thought he was turned into a paperweight yesterday, I was really quite upset.

 

Found this. Sent same. You know it's the yellow gizzie right?

 

Ah... yes. I had a suspicion that is was meant to be there as there was an empty socket, and a B1 on the service manual.
Thanks for the picture, helped me confirm polarity, I've got an old battery from a broken IBM laptop that *should* fit the socket, when I can be bothered to do another disassembly. It's late now so I'm off to bed.

If I ever become in charge of manufacturing laptops, I'll make the bios batteries with that rainbow gradient from office that everybody overuses just for a laugh. Then it will be called the rainbow battery.