Sager P377SM Not turning on

Hello, I was able to buy a P377SM laptop(4810mq, 16gb ram, Dual gtx 980m) on sale for $350 but the seller told me that the laptop doesn't turn on. I was able to check it and when I press the power button the screen stays black and the led lights on the side and the keyboard turn on. The laptop then shuts down after a couple of seconds. Does anyone have any ideas as to why? I was thinking it could have been a bad bios flash which I could fix with a programmer. But there's also the possibility of a dead GPU. I am able to return to laptop within a week if I can't fix it. I would appreciate any help.

 

Usually dead machines are purchased by those who have a knowledge of repair, could be the gpu or motherboard.

 

Usually a dead GPU prevents power up.

 

My first thought would be try booting with minimal ram and only one GPU (as mentioned above).

Remove the bios battery under the keyboard for a while.

Other than that, I'd try using your eeprom programmer to flash a master vbios onto the slave card and test. Would need to confirm if this is all you need for a slave 980m card to work. Who knows, it might work without changing the vbios, just swap the card over.

Flashing the system bios with a programmer can be annoying with the amount of things you have to remove to get to the chip.
Which is why I ended up cutting the plastic under my keyboard to have easy access to the bios chip (when I was messing around with unlocking bios options and downgrading microcode to enjoy unlocked multipliers on the 4710mq).

I followed this method to recover from a bad flash:
https://www.rototron.info/recover-bricked-bios-using-flashrom-on-a-raspberry-pi/

I'm still leaning towards a GPU issue though, as even with a bad bios my machine would stay on longer than a couple of seconds.

 

You can turn the system on with no GPUs. There will just be no image and it won't stay on for much more than a minute.

Programmer flashing is not as simple as you think. For BIOS you download the NVRAM section is blank, and the BIOS cannot be flashed directly. You would need a running image where a functional system had its BIOS dumped to have a functional NVRAM section. I've never actually seen bad BIOS brick a system except for when I was trying to mod my own BIOS. I'm just saying you will probably make things worse by trying to flash the BIOS with a downloaded image.

 

A corrupt flash can occur, that's why we recommend to only update if necessary.

 

Happened literaly hundreds of times when I repaired laptops as a job, it was on the early days of Win10, the number of corrupted BIOS images was astounding.

Asus has a special tool that does JTAG over the keyboard ribbon connector to flash both the EC and the BIOS on bricked machines, pretty nifty, for other brands, I usually replaced the flash chip and programmed a dump or an original recovery image when we had access to those from the OEMs.

 

I would do extensive trouble shooting before returning it.
First, do a complete cmos reset
- remove bios battery and regular battery, press and hold power button for 30s

Test whether it turns on, if not, remove slave GPU and try with a single GPU. Then swap master and slave GPU and try again.
Also try with a single stick of ram in slot 4, testing both sticks in the process.

 

Make a note of any kind of change of behaviour when doing each of those steps.