keekwai Posted July 19, 2004 Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 My laptop will power on but doesn't go through POST. It won't boot from the CD ROM or floppy drive. It's intermittent at this point, if I turn it on and off several times I eventually get it to boot normally. I went to the hard drive manufacturer's website (Toshiba) to see if there are any diagnostic tools available but no luck there. Everything important is backed up now so no worries there. Any ideas are welcome. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adikgede Posted July 19, 2004 Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 Where does POST stop? If it were just the hard drive I think you should be able to boot from a cd or a floppy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gummigut Posted July 19, 2004 Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 Not sure we have our definitions straight. POST is the power on self test which is the computers way for the BIOS to see if everything is working correctly. If not, you'll get beep messages or maybe even a text error number. In which case, what you need to do is to listen for the beeps/error message and find out what your BIOS and motherboard is. Look up the BIOS error codes to determine the problem and do a search on the model number of the motherboard to see if others have a similar problem. Beeps on a BIOS self test will usually tell you whether the problem resides with RAM, the CPU, storage solution, or some such. First step is to listen to the beeps to find out where the problem relies. Second thing you might want to do is to update your bios. Listen to the beeps again if it occurs. p.s. I don't know a thing about computers, use this information at your own risk. This message will self destruct in 5 secrovian seconds. <<burp>> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlton68 Posted July 19, 2004 Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 keekwai, if you have problems with the hard drive the bios would tell you so during boot. A message similar to 'hard disk error - press del to enter setup'. Something in that direction. No idea what your problem is. Do you get any error messages? Are you familiar with the bios setup? If not forget about the next idea: enter bios setup, look for an option 'load default settings'. Do that. No idea if it solves you problem, I'd try it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzzz Posted July 19, 2004 Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 You may want to get into bios to see if it's set-up to boot from cd or floppy. It may be possible to use an emergency disk or cd, if you have one, and do diagnostics, virus scan, etc on your HD and fix the problem. If not you may have to format the HD and reinstall the backup. If you have a spare HD, try it in the unit to see if it's really a HD problem. It could be a loose connection in your unit or a motherboard prob. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keekwai Posted July 19, 2004 Author Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 Thanks to all for the replies. When I press the power button I just get a blank screen, no messages, beeps or anything although the power indicator is on and I can hear the little benign noises that normally originate from the laptop. There is no opportunity to enter the BIOS. Under normal conditions the boot sequence is CD ROM, floppy, hard drive. Now the CD drive spins but will not boot. The floppy does nothing with a bootable floppy in the drive. I've booted from both the CD ROM and floppy drives in the past. I may be using the wrong terminology to say that my laptop doesn't go through POST, it's all that I could think of since nothing at all appears to be happening and that is the first thing that happens when the power button is pressed?? When I have been able to boot up the OS I've gotten a few stop errors (blue screen of death) and everything just goes blank at other times. At the moment I have the laptop started in safe mode. It is staying on and not blanking out now which may be a good sign. I checked the event log and True Vector event 5007 is the only one that sticks out but I think that's related to ZoneAlarm and should have no effect on the computer booting up although I disabled it anyways. I used the recovery console and ran fixmbr and fixboot both successfully but with no apparent change. I would certainly like to run some kind of diagnostics on it as it seems to be getting more difficult to start each time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlton68 Posted July 19, 2004 Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 Hi, given the info I would rule out the hard drive. It's not the hard drive that gives you headaches. There is a small program made by IBM (who sold their harddrives to Hitachi) to check drive fitness named the Drive Fitness Test . It creates a bootable floppy and during the rare times your laptop boots up you can boot from the floppy and check the hard drive. But your problem starts earlier. I think something with the hardware (not the drive). As far as I can say you need a technician to have a close look at your laptop. Sorry, not the answer you were looking for. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 19, 2004 Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 Most likely you have a nasty virus that is preventing the OS from coming up. Most likely a Master Boot Vius such as Sasser. If you can get into safe mode, connect to the Internet and go to www.pandasoftware.com and run their online scan. It is very reliable. What OS aare you using.?? A boot sidk for win98/orME will get u up. or a boot CD for 2k or xp. Or you can drop it off to my shop and we'll have a look........oops, forgot about the travel bit You'll be ok, may need to wipe you system though, so I hope everything is backed up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 19, 2004 Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 You may want to run a full scandisk to check for bad sectors on the HDD which may let it start in safe mode but not normally. You can also download the windows memory diagnostic to test your RAM from here: http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp Other than that you may be looking at Mainboard or power supply problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adikgede Posted July 19, 2004 Report Share Posted July 19, 2004 I agree with Carlton if it was the HD you probably would be consistantly getting trough POST or to the same error. The exception would be if POST is frequently getting stuck detecting a drive. We have this happen a lot at work, POST isn't actually hanging but its not timing out when it should to report a drive error. If you have power but no screen you can check to see if its actually there without a display by hooking it into a network and seeing if its visible to other computers or even keying around, logging in [CTRl][ALT][DEL] to shut down ... It looks like you did the right thing trying fixmbr and fixboot, those should fix any drive geometry problems. If it were a virus I doubt the thing would be crapping out so early. If you can get it to boot from a CD many Linux CDs are good at picking up hardware errors like disc controllers and bad ram. Some of the live CDs have memory testers. In terms of things you could check out I would check the power supply and the RAM. Those are two thing that can give you an inconsistant set of errors and what it sounds like your reporting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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