On Tue, 9 Nov 2010, Chris Knadle wrote:
On Tue, November 9, 2010 11:31 am, Luther Woodrum wrote:
Someone dropped off a toshiba qosmio laptop, which has a strange problem.
It supposedly was running vista, but it never gets anywhere near the boot
sequence. At first I suspected the hard drive, but it will not enter any
of the bios menus on f2, f8, f12, del, etc.. All it does is beep
whenever I press any key, and in the upper left corner of a black screen
there is a blinking underline for a cursor.
This sounds like the BIOS is corrupt and isn't loading correctly. If
that's the case, unfortunately there's probably not a lot you can do
unless the BIOS chip is removable and you have the necessary hardware to
reflash it. On rare occasions you can find malware that will infect
either the BIOS or the video BIOS, both of which can cause the computer to
be unbootable thereafter until the BIOS is reflashed, so there are reasons
besides hardware failure in which this can happen.
...
Has anyone seen this before?
I haven't run into something quite this bad, but I have run into a
situation where a computer would run just barely but not correctly because
the BIOS was corrupt -- reflashing it fixed the issues I was having.
However one of the places I worked at had a virus/trojan infect certain
motherboards in the BIOS such that the computers wouldn't boot, and they
were able to pull the BIOS chips and reflash them. I didn't personally
see that operation, though, as it happened a few months before my arrival.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
Duh! (Sound of hand hitting head) For some reason I didn't do the obvious
with this laptop that I do with any other machine, like desktops
and servers.
If it won't boot, but keeps on trying, and trying, with no beeps,
.... and trying... and maybe even eventually does come up and runs, but
really, really slow..
The top 3 reasons why it keeps trying are
(1) DD Dirt or Dust, aka spiderwebs, grease. Completely clogged fins.
(2) BB Bad Battery. The CMOS battery only lasts 4 or 5 years.
(3) CC Check the Connections. Maybe moisture caused oxidation on
the connections, and moving them in and out might reestablish
the connection. Or maybe something just came loose.
I will check it tomorrow.
I just found out that this laptop is from a returning soldier from
the deserts in Iraq, so DD or BB is very likely.
It doesn't have a cdrom drive, so it is probably around 5 years old.
It could be BB.
Lex
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