Dead Notebook

[juppy]

Hi guys.

My brother has a Compaq Presario M2000 notebook computer that has totally lost power. He said he was using it at work when the battery power started to get low and it said it was going to go into hibernation. It shut down and shortly after that he plugged in the AC adapter to bring it back up and running. It said something like "Returning to Windows" and then the power just went kaput. Everything.....totally dead.....won't turn on or anything. No battery charging lights, nothing.

We thought it might be the power jack, because after Googling around we had found several mentions of that being the problem. I took it apart and checked the power jack with my multimeter though and it seems to be fine. I don't see anything visually burned on the motherboard either. The only other thing I tried was something else I found while Googling, that said to remove all power sources and hold the power button for 20 seconds. I don't know what this is supposed to accomplish, but on this machine it did nothing for it. Any ideas?

If we DO have to just write it off as a hunk of junk, my brother said he'd like to be able to get some of the info off of the hard drive. Do those external enclosures for hard drives accept notebook-style drives too or just the normal IDE kind of plug? And if so, whats a good one?

[kamikazi_tom]

Try this! You gotta do it in this order though.
1. Unplug your external power
2. Pull out battery
3. Hold down power button for 1 to 2 minutes (This drains the capacitors)
4. Plugg in JUST the external power.


This may help. I'm sorry to hear of your loss. I love my Compaq Presario R3320US. I used to play Counter Strike Source on that beast of a video card, Radeon 9000 IGP

BTW Compaq's battery's are garbage. I've been through 3 already. Arg.
Anyways, Good Luck!

Tom =]

[mairving]

You might see if you can find another power adaptor to try it. They seem to go out every once in a while.

Here is something that will allow you to retrieve data off the old hard drive. I am actually using one right now to reformat a drive.

[juppy]

kamikaze tom > Well, like I said, I had tried that little trick already, but just not for that amount of time. The info I saw about it said 30 seconds should do it, so that's what I did. I went back and tried for at least 2 minutes like you suggested, and no change. Still dead as a doornail. Thanks for the suggestion though!

mairving > We thought about it being the power adaptor too. I didn't post that because I knew we were using a known-good one (it worked fine on another laptop, but on this one it has no effect). After doing quite a bit of Googling last night, I'm really starting to suspect the motherboard went belly up on this thing. There are numerous posts from people with this model that have had the same problem.....using it fine and then *poof* it goes dead. Pretty much every one that I read about turned out to be a bad motherboard, and since this thing's out of the warranty period, it'd be out of our pocket to buy one and I'm not sure if it's worth it if they go bad so quickly (one guy had his die 3 times in one year!). I ran across one of those adapters on Newegg last night (like you linked to), and that's probably the route we'll take with it.....data recovery then junk it. Kinda leery about using one of those things though.....I've heard several horror stories about people frying the drive with them. Hopefully that won't be the case with ours. Thanks for the reply!

[mairving]

Kinda leery about using one of those things though.....I've heard several horror stories about people frying the drive with them. Hopefully that won't be the case with ours. Thanks for the reply!

I have used mine 50 or so times. The only problem that I had was when I connected to the USB first and then plugged the power in. The USB port quit working until after a reboot. You don't have that issue with a laptop HD since it is powered by the USB. I even use an old laptop HD as a backup device.

[juppy]

Yeah, that was another thing I read about with those, that they're picky about the order in which connections are hooked up. We're going to try it anyway though.....ordered one from Newegg today, so it should be here by the end of the coming week.

I honestly figured alot of the "problems" that I read about were likely caused by people being careless. Things like getting the connector one pin off to one side or other hookup problems that *could* be avoided with just a little extra double checking before powering up. Thanks for the confidence booster though, mairving.....that helps me feel a little better about trying this.