interesting laptop crash even in bios (satpro)

[amos]

Hi

A friend has an old Toshiba Satellite Pro (1998) - can't remember the model of the top of my head - guessing it was a 480CDT. It is dual boot, and crashes in both linux and windows. I got my hands on it, and found it even crashed when we went into the bios. The crash is a power down, and it leaves a little flashing power light as if it were in standby mode (?? not sure if it means this or something else). When booting up windows 95 for example it crashes at exactly the same point in the load cycle (during scandisk). There didn't seem to be any variation (as I might expect with an overheat powerdown for example), even if the time to the failure point was varied slightly. It always powers down in all situations (whatever operating system, even in bios). I have got it to power down when simply waiting for a keypress etc. Certainly it does not seem to be HDD related.

My line of reasoning from this is

Memory failure:
This might well cause problems at the same place in a bootup, but would be less likely to happen in the bios or while waiting for input? It would more likely produce an error or blankout rather than power down.

Overheat powerdown:
The fan is not running - I presume that the fan only runs when necessary on these machines. Can anyone confirm that? If it is supposed to run constantly then that might be a problem. An overheat powerdown would occur at a similar time from bootup, but not with the accuracy that I seem to see surely? Wouldn't it get worse with more boots, as the machine already got hotter?
Besides I don't know if this machine supports overheat powerdown.

Failure of some standby switch:
But would expect this to be more intermittent and not as regularly timed.

AC/Battery failure
Maybe old battery doesn't change properly, and AC adapter not stable enough to power machine without battery (v. unlikely - scratching bottom of barrel here).

Some other failure:
Would want to rule out memory or overheat failure first before consigning machine to the bin.

Is anyone able to provide further enlightenment?

Thanks in advance.

[Christian-Comp]

I can see memory deal and overheat (moreso than memory) but have you thought about a faulty video connection to the LCD screen?

[Duralogic]

I just fixed a Tosh with very similar problems.

The bad news is that the motherboard needed to be replaced. We have also seen this behaviour in systems that have a “minor“ CPU fault.

Raj
TechnoMart Laptop Services
www.techno-mart.co.uk

[amos]

Originally posted by Christian-Comp
I can see memory deal and overheat (moreso than memory) but have you thought about a faulty video connection to the LCD screen?

Yes I did, but a click and change in the setting of the LEDs on the front indicate something more significant than that is happening. Also a faulty video connection would generally be more erratic than this.

Thanks anyway - it was certainly a possibility worth considering.

[amos]

Sorry about the delay in concluding this thread. Just to say that the problem was that the battery had dodoed, and for some reason, even with the power cable in, the laptop thought it wasn't getting enough power and binned out. Removal of the dead battery (without replacement) solved the problem.