No boot on A305

I picked up an A305-S6861 for a song a few days ago because it was getting to the point that it was a shot in the dark if it would boot for the previous owner. Out of probably 75 attempts by me to boot into Vista, it booted twice. The first time it booted, I looked around in the system a bit and decided to see if it would reboot from Vista. It wouldn't. The second time it booted, I let it set there while I had a cup of coffee and when I returned it was locked up. I had to power it down. During all the attempts to boot the system, the Toshibia #1 Restore cd was in the dvd drive. It would not fall back to the cd and boot from it. At this point I have moved the memory into another machine that uses the identical spec. memory and the other system runs fine with it. I have also moved the HD over to my A215 and it locates the drive and begins the boot into Vista with no problem. At this point I'm "assuming" the problem is at motherboard level. Can anyone give me any other tests of any sort I can try before I start to take this pup apart?

I forgot to say the fan always powers up and I do get various blinks of the HD light.

 

Try updating the BIOS on it.

 

I have done bios updates before but it has always been on a bootable machine. How do I update the bios if the unit will not boot?

 

So you're telling me it can't even get to BIOS?

In that case, it would probably be best to send it back. It sounds like a BIOS/Motherboard, in which case it would be impossible to fix, unless you try flashing it in the time that it does actually boot.

 

That is correct...except in the one of the two very rare occasions that it did boot. I just looked around at the settings and let it continue the boot.

The bios had occurred to me and I had downloaded the latest and burned the iso to a cd. That cd is in the drive now as I power it up and power it down in case it decides to boot again...which I doubt will happen.

I bought the system from the original owner who is a college student. The problem was an intermittent one that started 10 to 11 months after purchase. When it became obvious there a serious problem...it was out of warranty. Same old story. His parents bought him a new machine. My daughter, who is in classes with him, told me about it. I offered him $75.00 for it and he jumped at it. At that price, I can afford to spend money on it and I believe it will be a keeper.

I've had my hands and head inside of computers since the golden days of the original XT class of desktops but relatively new to laptops. I've found new mobos on the net for it and a tutorial on disassembly of the A305 units. I think I'll go ahead and get the work bench cleaned off and start dissembling.

 

If it's out of warranty, and you didn't end up spending all that much money on it, then it's definitely worth a try replacing the motherboard yourself.

 

OK...the dis-assembly has gone very smooth to this point...approx 2/3 through...but I am at a point where I'm stumped. Hopefully there are some hw techs that can answer a question.
Would someone look at this photo from the tutorial. Specifically at the cable at the yellow arrow.

http://www.irisvista.com/tech/lapto...05/disassembly-big/disassembly-process-19.jpg

The tutorial says to "unlock it and remove". It isn't obvious to me how to unlock the cable

 

Never mind....I figured it out. The old board is out...the cpu is in the new board ...but for the lack of a tube of heat sink grease the reassembly will have to wait till I make a trip to town tomorrow. I was sure I had a couple of those stinking little tubes left. DARN!!!

 

Well the operation was a success and the patient is running all over the place. I also found out while I had my hands in its guts, the grill on the cooling fan was about 90% clogged. Kinda like having a major artery clogged.

 

So it's working now?

If so, that's good.

 

Working like a champ.

It's a VERY nice machine. After re-assembly and a day or so of playing with it, I did an "Out of the box" restore and I am switching it over to to be my main machine. The only problem I've had with the 64bit Vista is the lack of a 64bit driver for my Epson scanner. Luckily, Cannon had a 64bit patch of my i560 printer. The scanner isn't a big deal because I'm in linux 98% of the time. Every feature of the system is supported in my distro out of the box so I can scan that way.

Not bad for an old farm boy....

 

Does the fingerprint scanner work with Linux?

I agree, it is a nice machine, I have an A300, (much like the A305), and it's a rather good laptop.

 

No fingerprint scanner on this model. It does have a FM tuner and built-in web cam though. The web cam works in great linux but I haven't tried the FM tuner yet. I haven't figured out what device it would be recognized as in linux. Then again, we don't have any FM stations out here.

 

Really? i thought all the A3xx series had a fingerprint scanner?

Nice to know compatibility of Linux with the devices. Windows 7 doesn't recognize my webcam or fingerprint scanner