Sager 9860 w/ 6.2 rev mobo won't boot.

I've had this laptop since May 2005. It's on it's second motherboard and third video card. I recently started having a problem which I believed was related to overheating. During 3D gaming the 3 blue lights next to the power switch would start to flash and then the machine would shutdown. I purchased the Zalman NC-2000 laptop cooler and that seemed to help for awhile, but the problem started up again and eventually it got to a point where it would not boot at all.. upon powering up the blue power button stays lit, the clock lights on the front, and the three blue lights come on, then start to flash, then the machine powers off. I emailed Sager tech support and they really had no answer for me other than "send it in again". I figured it was probably a video-card issue so I've purchased another video card and replaced the ATI x800 I had with an NVIDIA 6800 ultra. I also purchased a new Lite-on brand 11A 220W adapter. After installing the 6800 ultra, the laptop is still doing the same thing. I've pulled out RAM, tried with one stick, tried reseating vid card a few times, even pulled the CPU heatsink and made sure everything was seated properly cleaning and replacing thermal compund with AC5 every time. It pains me that this major (over $5000 now) investment is dying or possibly dead. If anyone has any other suggestions or information for me it would be greatly appreciated.

 

Welcome to the NBR forums.

sorry to hear your story.

this is a Clevo D900T.... which was infamous for heating issues... mainly due to it being one of the first notebooks to use high-end videocard with high-end desktop CPU.

you seem to know what you are doing... hardware wise and maintenance.

if the vents are clear, and it still over heats.... hmm...

what are the temps of the components?

Use these great utilities:
- HWmonitor
- Core Temp
- RivaTuner (best for GPU in-game temp monitoring)

Also, make sure to use the Fan Toggle (Fn+F2) to switch all fans to max speed to help prevent overheats.

 

Thank you for the response Gophn. I did a bunch of searching of this and a few other forums and you seem to be the D900 "guru" around here. I was sort of hoping you'd respond.

When the machine first started having the issue I was using Getthermal to monitor temps and it wasn't ever really getting too hot. Now it doesn't even boot so I can't use any programs or anything like that. It's always seemed like a "safety feature" of the computer when it would do the 3 blue flashing LEDS and then complete power-down. I though for awhile that it was an "under power" issue, and that's why I bought the 11AMP AC Adapter.

So, at this point I am not really sure what the exact issue might be, but sometimes if I put pressure on the bottom of the unit, right in the middle front basically where the harddrives are, it will stop the shutdown if I do it while it's still flashing before the power-off. This makes me think it's some loose connection, like something isn't seated...but I digress. I'm probably going to fiddle around with it a little more this week, but I'm seriously thinking it's about to the point where I'll just have to start parting it out and get whatever I can from it's components.

 

sounds like a loose connection.

check the stand offs on the motherboard to see if they are still secured by the solder.

 

i have gone through several d900t deaths. i replaced the v5.1 mobo with v6.2 myself and that only lasted for 6 months until it died again. had several dead gpu's as well.

best thing to do is send it in to sager and have them replace or repair a loose connection to the motherboard. be prepared to spend another 250-500 with shipping costs for the repair.

i ended up spending over 1k for repairs the years following the initial purchase so i learned my lesson and purchased the 3 year warranty with the new d900.

 

Well, I think I found the culprit. I figured I had nothing to lose so I began to take everything apart, clean connections up with denatured alcohol, check for loose connections, etc. and while I was inspecting the video card connections on the motherboard, I found that one of the 80 or so little tiny copper connection points on the longer connector was bent over to the side. I painstakingly and carefully nudged it back into place and found one other that was also slightly out of place. After reassembly, Booya! No more 3 flashing lights, it went all the way into windows, but now I have severe video corruption which looks like it might be bad video memory. It's like a small screen pattern or almost checkerboard pattern all over the screen, I can sort of see to navigate but it's obviously not a driver or software issue as the corruption appears throughout all screens from initial BIOS POST all the way thru to the desktop. I just purchased this card "used -pulled from working system" off ebay and I'm hoping they'll still do a DOA exchange on it for me. They had quite a few for sale. We'll see.... I'm just happy I was able to get the thing to boot again.

 

Oh, and yes, Gophn, one of the standoffs for the video card is loose. This weekend when I have more time I'm going to bust out the solder-wick, and desolder the thing and then try to solder it back.

 

you can tell if its the videocard or the LCD (or its connections) if you plug it into an external monitor.

if the patterns are not on the external monitor, then there is a loose or faulty connection from the motherboard to the LCD

if the pattern is there, then the videocard has physical damage.

... or you can do it my way.

for the time being, you can try to brace the heatsink down with folding a piece of paper thick enough to brace it down on the faulty screw/standoff area when you close up the bottom panel and secure it down.

 

I haven't tested it with an external monitor yet, which I plan to do tonight, but I was able to get approval from the ebay seller to send the card back for exchange, so that's good news. Another step closer to bringing this thing completely back to life.

 

I wanted to post a follow-up. I am currently posting this message on my completely resurrected 9860! After sending the replacement video card back to the ebay seller and getting another replacement, I have installed it and my laptop is once again running like a dream.

I also recently acquired the SATA cable for the hard drives. I want to replace this 60gb PATA with a couple larger SATAs and put them on RAID 0. Does anyone have a suggested drive that works well? I know this machine is limited to sata150 drives or jumper crippled sata300s i guess, hehe. I've read the scorpion drives are nice? Tiger direct has some pretty good prices on 2.5 SATAs. Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.

 

you should look towards Seagate Momentus drives since they are fully SATA-I and II compatbile.

And Hitachi Deskstars are good as well.