Need some help... D901 Bios POST Codes??

Greetings All…

I’m a new member of the forum with, unfortunately, a tale of woe.

On the advice of a friend who owns a couple of Sager D901c units I purchased a used one for my daughter back in December. It’s been great machine with very minimal issues and I was and still am suitably impressed. A few weeks ago, I purchased a second used D901c for myself and have had real problems with it.

While I couldn’t tell from the pictures posted, it turned out not to be a Sager, but a PC Microworks Black Hawk. Anyway……

My unit started throwing blue screens and crashes at me a couple of weeks after arrival. I had cleaned dust and lint from the fans and sinks when I noticed the temperature rise exceeding what was the norm for my daughters. (This had triggered thermal shutdown on one occasion.) This seemed to solve the blue screen-crash-reboot issue temporarily. (I was running XP sp3; I was also running with the cooling fans turned up to full (Ctrl-1).)

The behavior returned a a little under a week later, mainly when playing Warcraft. The game would freeze and then the system reboot, sometimes the display degraded. I reinstalled the video drivers and put in a fresh copy of Warcraft. Problem seemed solved.

A couple of days later, the behavior returns, with Warcraft crashing either directly to reboot or a very short blue screen (too short to read), then to boot. The behavior then began occurring in other programs or from desktop. (I thought I saw a “Interrupt non-zero” on one of the blue screens and a possible reference to a video driver on another.)

Long story short, my unit now fails to boot; it cannot even execute the POST bootstrap.

What does happen on power-up is the hard drive activity light flashes seven times at regular intervals of about a second and some mechanical sounds are heard. The Disk Access Light then flicker for a moment and nothing further occurs. The Bios cannot even get to the POST/BIOS banners.

Has anyone else had an experience like this?

Is the Disk Access light sequence meaningful (as in a POST code) or not? If so, what is the meaning?

Is there anything I can do to effectuate repair myself? Or do I just box the poor beastie up and send it to SAGER. (I know from reading the other discussion threads that I’m SOL with PC Microworks.)

 

Could you post your temperatures when the screen turns blue?

 

You didn't said what was heating? I bet you damaged your Graphic card. But it can be the LCD Display, PSU, or MB...Have you tried to start the Laptop connected to an exterior Monitor? Give your mobo specs.

 

Wish I could answer about the temperatures but since I can't even get it to display the BIOS banner, let alone boot from the drives... Also, prior to the failure, I didn't have system monitoring software on it.

As best as I can recall
Clevo D901c / PCMW - Blackhawk
CPU: Intel Q6700 quad core 2.66GHz
Mem: 2x 2gb DDR2 (shielded)
GPU: dual 8800 nvidia
HDD: 3x360gb seagate(?)

When I press the power button, the blue light comes on, the status lights flash once. Then the HDD activity light blinks seven times at about 1 sec. intervals, then it gives a quick flicker and no further activity occurs.

The Function+1 switch for the fans still works.

For what it's worth, the heat output from the unit after the fans and heat sinks were cleaned of dust (very early on) and it appeared to generate about the same level of heat as my daughter's Sager (judging from the perceived temperature of the exhaust against my hand).

 

Most probably one of yours Graphic card is dead. Try to connect to an exterior monitor. You have two cards, take one and try the mobo, exchange and try again.
Or take the GC of the other Lap and put ‘it in yours, if it works one of yours GC has a problem.