Help with Clevo D900k not POSTing

Hi folks, I've a Clevo D900K from Xtreme Notebooks with an expired warranty. It has just stopped booting even as far as the POST screen. I get one beep a little HD noise then the screen flickers and it starts over. Specs as follows

A Clevo mobo based on VIA 8237 chipset.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
2GB Wintech RAM
Geforce GO 7800 GTX
2 Hitachi Travelstars in Raid 0 array
Pioneer DVR-K16

I have already taken out one component at a time all way down to just mobo, keyboard, touchpad, and LCD without ever being able to get it to post. Any ideas would be much appreciated. I had been advised in an earlier post to contact Gophn as he may have a service manual, but I have no PM contact for him on this board. I did find his YouTube page and sent a PM from there, but I have not heard from him....he's probably on vacation somewhere . Anyone else have the service manual? I still have my user manual, but it's pretty much useless for troubleshooting/repair issues.

Thanks in advance;

Ionik Knight

 

@Ionik:

Sorry, didn't realize you didn't have a pm address for Gophn - his member page can be found here, from whence you can send either a pm or an email. He might be off taking a well-deserved Fourth of July break this weekend, which might help explain the lack of a response.

In terms of your troubles, since it's cutting out so quickly, it sounds like possibly a BIOS problem; have you tried setting up a bootable CD/DVD to reflash the BIOS? (EDIT: I realize that, if it's cutting out so quickly, this might not be a workable solution since it might never get to the point of hitting the CD/DVD drive, but I'm going to leave it here anyways so it can be properly knocked down by someone else).

It also sounds like it might be a power problem; have you visually inspected the motherboard, particularly at the contact points where power comes in, to see if you can see any signs of burning, or damaged/broken contacts or solder-joints?

Lastly, since you seem to be technically capable, you might consider seeing if you can get your hands on a diagnostic card that will read the POST codes that the BIOS feeds to com port 80h (that's usually the port that's used). Two examples I found are this one from Soyo Corp. that actually plugs into a PCI slot (may not be useful on a notebook, unfortunately, but serves as an example of what I'm trying to describe) or this diagnostic kit available from the Cleveland Institute (although this one's a bit pricey - again, I listed it more as an example of the sort of thing I'm thinking about). Basically, since it sounds like you've got a fatal BIOS error, that may be the only way to get the POST codes out of the system.