Help!

Friar

My sister's laptop isn't working. I shut it down normally, and when I clicked the power button to turn it back on it just tries to turn on for a few seconds, then turns off. Then back on again. Then off (and so on). I've tried removing the battery to end the cycle, but when I put it back in and hit the power button it started the cycle again. Any ideas?

There were no syptons before turning off that anything was wrong, other than the blu-ray player software not loading, and the blu-ray plaer software auto-update not installing. Which is why I turned it off in the first place.

Ribs

I am hesitant to make my usual joke about how you should reset your router...

der_ketzer

how far does that go? Do you get to logging in for example.

Is something overheating? -> check bios if you can get that far.

Is the battery charged?

Have you tried reinstalling the OS? -> could you even do that or will it not get that far.

Friar

It doesn't get anywhere. It's just a black screen, with the various boot-up sounds. My first thought would be something along the BIOS lines, but I figured there would be some sort of error message somewhere along the lines. Oh, and the battery was around 90% charged. No idea what it's at now though, but it's been plugged in too, so that's fine. In fact when I first removed the battery I was shocked when it booted up again, before realising the power plug was still in.

I couldn't get through to Sony support or the shop she got it from, so I've taken out the battery again (with careful timing so it was done just after power dies but before it attempts rebooting) and I'm leaving it like that overnight, to avoid any additional damage that may be being done to the system. If it's a hardware failure or something is shorting out.

I've never even heard of anything like this happening before. Some extensive googling seems to show that it only really seems to happen to HP laptops and custom builds, of which hers is neither.

But it's still in warranty, so we should be covered. Except for re-installing the OS, as manufacturers are too cheap to include discs these days, and charge you if you want them. I created recovery discs (like they ask you to) for my current laptop, but they were absolute rubbish, only worsening issues because they were corrupted.

Amy Lukima

Friar wrote: »

It doesn't get anywhere. It's just a black screen, with the various boot-up sounds. My first thought would be something along the BIOS lines, but I figured there would be some sort of error message somewhere along the lines. Oh, and the battery was around 90% charged. No idea what it's at now though, but it's been plugged in too, so that's fine. In fact when I first removed the battery I was shocked when it booted up again, before realising the power plug was still in.

I couldn't get through to Sony support or the shop she got it from, so I've taken out the battery again (with careful timing so it was done just after power dies but before it attempts rebooting) and I'm leaving it like that overnight, to avoid any additional damage that may be being done to the system. If it's a hardware failure or something is shorting out.

I've never even heard of anything like this happening before. Some extensive googling seems to show that it only really seems to happen to HP laptops and custom builds, of which hers is neither.

But it's still in warranty, so we should be covered. Except for re-installing the OS, as manufacturers are too cheap to include discs these days, and charge you if you want them. I created recovery discs (like they ask you to) for my current laptop, but they were absolute rubbish, only worsening issues because they were corrupted.

I did some quick googling. If you read down this page they gave some pretty decent instructions. http://forums.cnet.com/7723-6142_102-113745.html

Friar

Hmm... thanks. That's given me an idea of what to expect anyway. I shall wait and see what they say tomorrow. This is the third time we've had issues with it since we got it in december. I'm thinking that perhaps the issues all stem from one undiagnosed problem. I'm afraid to try most of what they are suggesting to do, for fear of invalidating the warrantee, or causing further damage (for instance, a minor issue with my blu-ray player software having licensing validation issues turned into me losing all my data and then windows too, thanks to vaio's support centre and various recovery procedures.) I'll probably insist that they come and take it replace it or something.

GuruGuru214

So you can't get into the BIOS? And if you can't, is it possible for you to actually remove the Blu-Ray drive? I wouldn't swear to it, but it sounds to me like there's a slight possibility that the laptop is drying to boot from a disc and the Blu-Ray drive is causing a problem with that. I admit, even I see a couple reasons that this idea could be wrong, but it's an idea none the less.

Of course, the last time I really did any serious PC servicing was seven years ago, so I may have no idea what I'm talking about.

Alcoremortis

I had something similar happen when I tried to start up my computer with what turned out to be a non-compatible harddrive. So, instead of booting up from the harddrive like it was supposed to, it was trying to boot up from the optical drive instead. This didn't really work all that well.

flesk

The same thing happened to my wife's laptop a year and a half ago. The reason seemed to be a bug in a recent windows update. I was finally able to start windows in recovery mode and remove the latest updates. After that it worked just fine again, so I turned off automatic updates just in case.

Friar

Okay, I put the battery back in this morning whilst I was waiting in a queue for the support centre, and it booted up successfully. Yay!

puzzlebox

Ace! In that case I wonder if it was just overheated and needed some time to cool down.

Friar

Or perhaps there was some residual power in the machine that kept trying to boot the BIOS that had developed an error somewhere. Maybe removing the battery for an extended amount of time drained the last of that power, which in turn reset the BIOS or something.

Eh, that probably makes no sense. Anyway, thanks for the help guys! Fingers crossed it stays working!

WarpSpeed

Needless to say, this is an opportunity to make a backup of anything on that machine she would be heartbroken to lose.

Friar

My sister decided she wanted to play a monkey island game, but for some reason the installer on tales kept jamming (put the disk in, and click install on the GUI that popped up, and it jammed then). After various failed attempts at getting it to work, we shut it down and it did its failed boot-up loop again. So I took the battery out and went to phone up Sony the next day (as they were shut as it was too late), but they don't work weekends. And its seeming to work now. Boo. Installer still wasn't working though, so I used the downloads from my account.

Chyron8472

You need to backup all your data, and do a clean install of Windows.

Also, if you have Vista instead of 7 or XP, then boo. I hate Vista.