Laptop dead?

[DethDonald]

Hello, I am having a tragic issue with me laptop and was wondering if any of the more technical minded RPS members are capable of helping me.

I had my laptop at my friends house watching videos and just some Internet browsing. I left my computer not plugged in but on at his house as we left for about 15 minutes to grab some take out. When we returned my laptop's battery was dead. I plugged it back in and when I started it up all I would get was a blank screen. No OS boot screen or anything. It also sounds like my fans weren't starting up.

I removed some RAM and moved it around to different slots but to no avail. But the fans did boot when only one slot of RAM is active. I tried to boot with a recovery disc and a Ubuntu Flash Drive.

I think my laptop ran out of power halfway through an update or an update may have over wrote something that it shouldn't

Any ideas? I'll post specs once I get home.

[Daiv]

My Acer did that. It turned out that the bios had a fault - whenever the battery was utterly discharged it switched off the battery charger. Stupid laptop. I ended up having to get the hard reset procedure from Acer and flash the bios to a working verson from USB.

[DethDonald]

After getting home I decided to remove the hard drive and see if that was the problem. Well it was. Now I just need to find a windows 7 disk.

Thanks for the help anyway Daiv.

[trjp]

I find it hard to believe that a faulty HDD would stop a laptop from at least TRYING to boot-up - have you connected the laptop HDD to another PC to see if it's readable on that (as there will be a recovering partition on it I'd guess??)

[DethDonald]

The hard drive was the last thing that I expected myself. It was the only thing that I didn't try so I figured it was worth a shot. There actually isn't a recovery partition on it. I used an external hard drive to store my backups so I really didn't lose anything.

I haven't tested it on another computer or slot yet but I plan to. I hooked up an older laptop hard drive that I had laying around into the same slot that the original one was fitted into so I don't think that was the problem. I'll try placing the original hard drive back in the other slot later.