Toshiba Satellite A300 notebook won't turn on

Hey Guys,

Need your help and advice on what might be wrong with my A300 Toshiba Satellite.

It's wifey's laptop and she said she rebooted windows, got the logon screen and it was in the process of logging on and the a black screen. She may have closed the screen to go and do something and when she came back the laptop was off and wouldn't turn back on.

This is what I have done so far:

- Unplugged and removed battery for a while
- plugged in ac cable, notice ac light on lappy turned on
- pressed power button and after 1 or 2 seconds the ac light goes off
- noticed a weird smell from around the ac connection :-(
- dissassembled notebook
- nothing loose inside found
- checked internal power jack cable looked ok
- checked same area, think the smell is from the speaker (speaker on either side of notebook)
- re-assembled notebook
- same issue - ac light is on, press power button, ac light goes off
- thinking the speaker, disconnected the speaker cable from the motherboard but same issue

What do you think it may be?

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Andrew

 

Is the Battery completely flat, or does it not start with that in either?

Have a look at the Lid Switch and make sure it's not stuck.

 

I know that the battery is not in good condition. It has not held much charge for a while. The wife always leaves the lappy plugged into ac power so this has stuffed the battery.

Thanks for both ideas.... I'll check the lid switch but any ideas on what to look/check for? I'll plug in the speakers again and the battery and leave on charge for a while.

 

When you say it doesn't turn on, do you mean no sign of power at all? I have the p300 (i think its basically the same as yours) I got it for free because previous owner was told the motherboard was fried (they were quoted $600 lol)

It would just boot to the toshiba screen and not do anything else. I unplugged the cmos battery and turned it on. It gave me a cmos error. Turned it back off, plugged it back in and has been working fine for the past year and a half.

 

the only sign of power is the light indicating that ac power is present & if the battery is in too, the battery light is also on

I press the power button, no sounds at all and the lights go off

only way to get them back is to remove the battery & ac power, then plug all back in and they come back on

I think the motherboard might be fried as the speaker (harmon & kardon?) on the right hand side still has a weird smell

there is a ebay seller who has the a300 motherboards for about $120, but I'd need to make sure that it is the exact same before buying.

I'm setting up another laptop that I had lying around for her at the moment.

 

Well after leaving it plugged in charging the battery overnight and all today, the notebook turned on tonight.

It had no hard drives in it so it just posted.
I turned it off and it posted a second time.

re-installed the hdd's and it powered on but then the same thing happened.

I saw a message, something about partition and a recovery partition then it turned off and the same problem as before.

Before the message came up, I thought I heard a sound from one of the hdd's (it has 2). I know 1 is ok as it had all the data on it and I have copied this to the other laptop.

I'm going to check the system disk and see if maybe it has an issue.

 

Will it boot from the OS CD?

 

not when it is not powering on for obvious reasons.

when it did post though, I would imagine that it would.

I have a in-laws notebook coming on Friday. It is basically the same so I will be able to at try there ac charger and battery.

Even though the battery light is on, it is just lit up white. I'm pretty sure that if it was charging it would be orange.

 

Could be a gpu fault or motherboard, my money is on gpu

 

it's got a radeon in it

I was thinking motherboard, but now that it as posted since I'm not so sure.

 

It did power on without the HDD, so wouldn't this possibly indicate some fault with this? How about trying another HDD?

 

Yes but I have not had it post ago since.
It's been plugged in overnight and all day so when I get home from work I will see if it POST's again and then try another HDD

It's odd though that if it is a faulty drive, why does the speaker smell and why does the notebook not POST?

 

Bit of a weird suggestion, but would you feel comfortable taking the keyboard out trying to boot the machine? I had to fix a friends laptop and it wouldn't boot with a faulty keyboard attached. Wife didn't spill something on it?

 

Turned it on when I got home from work.

It did start to POST but quickly turned off.

I've now disassembled again and re-greased the CPU and the GPU & it's RAM chips.

Re-assembled, started again to POST bu quickly turned off.

miicah - I tried disconnecting the keyboard but the same issue.

 

am still having the same issue....

I can get it to begin to post after it has turned itself off by pulling the power cable and the battery if it is in also

today I had it powered on and post completed, no hdds plugged in, and it stayed on for a few minutes before it turned itself off. This was after battery was unplugged, power adapter was not plugged into wall also for a long period of time.

At the least I know the motherboard is powering on and the video card is displaying too. But maybe one of these is causing the power off. CPU & Gfx card re-greased.

I was starting to think the power supply itself which is rated 19V. Multimeter showed it as 19.4V so does this mean it is ok? Can the AMPS be checked?

I have gotten another battery from someone elses laptop but the issue happened with this also. I also got their power adapter but it is rated at smaller AMPS than my mine so I have't used it.

I used my power adapter on their notebook though and their notebook booted into windows. But maybe since their notebook doesnt require as many AMPS, my adapter if not working properly may still be able to supply enough AMPS for their notebook but no enough for mine.

Am running out of ideas.

Can anyone think of anything else?

 

I'll hazard a guess and say the Power Circuit on the MoBo is faulty.