What to do with frozen m570u

I was wondering if any knowledgeable people can give me some feedback on my current laptop situation.

In June of 2006, I bought an m570u from Eurocom for around $3K I believe. It's been fun and great and reliable since then and I really loved this machine, up until last week.

I came home and found it frozen on the windows screen saver and when I tried to reboot it froze again. I tried to boot ubuntu and it froze as well. Same for an osx86 partition. In windows safe mode it freezes on the bthidmgr.sys line, and in ubuntu, it complains right away about a pci bios error or something. When booting from the ubuntu live cd it halts at the same place. The windows install cd loads all the driver files and then freezes when it says "starting windows" or something, right before the first input screen.

I've tried:
-removing cmos battery for a while, resetting bios
-trying each ram stick one at a time
-putting in another hard drive
-disconnecting the bluetooth

My guess is the motherboard. I've exchanged a bunch of emails with Eurocom tech support and they say it's probably the motherboard also. They say that'll cost me $575 CDN plus $75/hr labour. Plus my shipping.

Anybody have any reason to believe it's not the motherboard? What do you think I should do? Is the laptop even worth that much (>$700)? Could I just get a new similar spec'd laptop in around that neighborhood? I can't find any m570u's on ebay, but similar dell m1710s seem to be around 700-800. It feels like such a waste to just scrap it. Especially when it was still running games pretty well. Is there a market for my parts?

Anybody know somewhere cheaper to get it repaired? Or somewhere cheap to buy the part. I emailed Sager, and they said $400 US which is somewhat cheaper, but they only do their own systems.

I appreciate any feedback.

 

from what you have said and troubleshoot attempts... it might be the motherboard.... or the videocard module.

Also have you tried to test with another CPU?

 

No, I don't have another CPU handy.

Not sure if this is relevant to the CPU, but forgot to mention I'm able to run memtest86 off the ubuntu live cd for about 10+ hours with no errors or freezing.

I've never had any video glitches before. It doesn't hang in random places. Always at the same lines. I can go through BIOS, and I get up to the windows standard graphic loading screen.

In your opinion, do you think $100+ for troubleshooting is worth it to find out if it's not the motherboard? I think I'll probably do this. It's just that all signs point to motherboard, and I'm on the fence about that.

I really loved this laptop, but man I wish there was a bigger parts market.

 

If you can get past all of the windows DOS set up stuff, There is a chance that you do not have a bad mainboard or bad cpu or bad ram or something ( probably ).

A PCI module is trying to initialize and can't. This could be anything, Wifi card? network card? video card?

I don' tknow anything about removing the components and stuff but that is the first thing I would try.

that SYS file you mentioned is bluetooth related ( according to google ) What do you mean you disconnected it? you removed the card from the board?

I would get the service manual and start removing pci cards one by one to see if you can boot at all.

 

Yeah, that's a good idea. I'll disconnect the wifi tonight (already tried the bluetooth.) I think the network is onboard. Not sure what else is unpluggable. I got the service manual last night.

Thanks

 

Well, good news! Sort of.

When I disconnect the wireless it seems to boot all the way. I can still see the "PCI BIOS BUG Detected..." error on Ubuntu, but it doesn't hang like it did before. But the bluetooth doesn't work even though it's still plugged in. Also I didn't have time to repeat it, but I think it still hung on the bthidmgr.sys line in safe mode, but it boots all the way in regular mode.

And once or twice, I got some weird rapid, repeating beeps right after or maybe towards the end of the POST, but they stopped and it kept booting.

At least now I can get it in a usable state. Didn't have much time last night, but I'll use it more in the next few days.

 

Ok, that means that it is clearly a problem with the bluetooth module. The file bthidmgr.sys is, I believe, the bluetooth driver, and the maker is a company called IVT Corporation, as indicated by this Spyware Data webpage and this one.

One thing that might help you stop the errors from ocurring while you get this straightened out is to look in your boot.ini (for XP) or in the BCD (_Vista) for a line that looks something like this:

and delete it (after, of course, having backed everything up first! ).

That should stop the OS from looking for, and starting, the bluetooth driver during boot, and thus you should no longer get the error from bthidmgr.sys.

The next step would be to replace your bluetooth module as it seems that there is a physical problem with it since you were getting an error related to the PCI system as well. I would, of course, first try reseating it and booting up (with the bthidmgr.sys line added back into your boot.ini or BCD, of course ), to see if maybe it wasn't just a case of a loose connection.

Once you've replaced the bluetooth module, I would get the latest version of the driver - bthidmgr.sys - uninstall the old and reinstall the new (just to make sure that you didn't also have a corrupted driver), and then put the bthidmgr.sys line back in the boot.ini or BCD, fire the system up, and see what happens.

Also, with respect to the beeping, write down the pattern and length of the beeps (e.g., two short, pause, two long, or something like that) and then check it against a list of Phoenix BIOS beep codes, just to make sure that there isn't something else wrong that's got the BIOS' undies in a twist.

 

Just restarted it when I got home from work. No beeps. This time. But I'm pretty sure it was beeping intermittently last night with this same configuration.

I tried fn+f12 and now the bluetooth works, so I guess it was just turned off (whoops.)

Have to head out again but I'll try some repeated reboots to test later on to make sure this isn't just a fluke.

 

Always be thankful to shyster and others who have helpd you.

 

Update.

Things seem to be pretty good. I'm keeping the wifi out, but I found a wireless G one on ebay for $13 so I figure it'll be worth it to try and see if it's the mobo or wireless itself. Cheaper than sending it back to the manufacturer. It'd be really great if it was only the wireless, but we'll see.

For some reason, my DVD drive is not detected in Windows, but it works in Ubuntu. Weird.

I guess I'll find out more when I get the wireless card. Worst case I could probably get a USB wireless key for cheap.

Thanks, to everyone for their help.

 

also i would personlly try re-flashing the bios. could be a corrupt part of it causing the issue as well..