BIOS recovery on Clevo M570U / Sager 5760 / Rock Xtreme CTX Pro ?

Hi - I'm desperately trying to recover my Xtreme CTX Pro (aka Clevo M570U or Sager 5760) which seemed to go south for no apparent reason a month or so ago. My initial though was the graphics card was bust, but I've been able to confirm by trying it on another machine that it's OK.

When I turn the laptop on, the power lights are as expected, the clock starts at '13:00', the HDD light appears for about 10-20 seconds then goes out. I can hear the disk spin up and occasionally the fan may activate briefly. There's nothing on screen, and no response to various keypresses (i.e Fn+F2). It doesn't even seem to be getting to the BIOS stage. If I take the CMOS battery out and power up - all is the same except clock starts at '00:00' instead.
It works fine in CD player mode though.

The symptoms sound like it *could* be a corrupt BIOS. I've replaced the CMOS battery with a new one, tried clearing it (I think just unplugging the CMOS battery for a bit does this doesn't it?). So failing any CMOS issues, has anyone managed to recover a BIOS? Does the Phoenix Trustedcore BIOS support Crisis Recovery Mode - and if so does anyone know how this is activated? (I've tried pressing Fn+B or Winkey+B or Fn+Esc or Winkey+Esc, plugin in power, switching on - but nothing unusual is happening).

It could just be a duff mobo of course but I'd be kicking myself if it's something that could be fixed easily.

 

i had a similiar thing with my clevo m575u, fixed by cleaning out the laptop (lots of dust between cpu and gpu cooler fins) and applying arctic 5 tim

take out the battery (not cmos) and disconnect mains power, leave for a few hours and try boot up.....just a thought

 

Hi - nope it's not that (though I have suffered from the dust thing too though). There's very little fan activity, and I've had the laptop apart loads of times and it's very clean now so i don't think heat is a problem.

 

Ignore this thread. I figured how to enable to boot diagnostic codes (hit the 'email' hotkey then plug in and turn on). It stalls on F0 which is a processor exception.
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-025434.htm