Advent 7081 Laptop no screen now

[alfie1noakes]

A friend has the above laptop, and managed to contract a boot sector virus. The machine is a M Processor 1.3 celeron.

He said that he didnt want any of the data on it, so we could just reformat it to save messing around.

I put a copy of Windows XP Professional in, and booted off of this disk. It found a 40gb partition, and so we pressed ok to reformat and start from a fresh.

Everything went ok, right up to the point at which all the temp files have been loaded on and you get the 15 sec restart and red bar. Took out the disk and pressed ok to reboot.

Now nothing. The screen doesnt even appear to come on; no backlight at all. The machine is on as the lights come on, and you can hear some regular activity from the hard disk or cd drive. But thats it. I have tried rebooting with the disk in, but nothing.

I tried to hook it up to a monitor to see if the screen had packed up, but again nothing. I now am not sure what to do, as I cant see anything or run anything.

Has anyone seen anything like this or have any ideas, I would be eternally thankfull...

Especially as its not mine, and I gave him the old "we'll have this up and running in no time....." line.

Many thanks

Andy

 

[LawnBoy]

Formatting won't touch a boot sector virus. Load fdisk and remove all partitions, then run 'fdisk /mbr' to rewrite the boot sector. Then you should have a clean drive.

"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

 

[alfie1noakes]

Hmm.. I am annoyed with myself as I was going to do that but for some reason didnt. Anyway..

The problem is, the screen is not firing up. It doesnt even look like the backlight is on. Its like someone has unplugged it. So I cant do anything.

I cant see what is happening, or any messages etc. Even when plugged into a separate monitor, it still show nothing. ? I am sort of stuck..It seems like it has just died, other than the hard disk / or cd drive sounding like it is looking for something.

 

[wahnula]

Remove the hard drive. See if the BIOS POSTS.

Tony

"Buy what you like, or you'll be forced to like what you buy"...me

 

[alfie1noakes]

Of course. Will try that in the morning, and will post the result.. no pun intended..;-)

 

[alfie1noakes]

OK,

Removed hard disk and rebooted.. Nothing. Not a glimer from the screen. Not even a flicker from the screen. The only thing that appears to happen is the cd drive is clicking, like its trying to find something, but we are talking straight away here, within seconds of starting.

It just seems to have died. I am a bit stumped here..

 

[wahnula]

Yes, this is a stumper, especially when you cannot get anything on the screen, it must be very frustrating.

Questions: How did your friend know he had a boot sector virus? Does this laptop have a floppy drive, or how is the BIOS loaded or flashed?

I am not at all familiar with this machine, but in general failure to POST means bad hardware(GFX, MB, CPU etc.). I have a USB docking station that contains a video adapter, NIC etc. that would be handy here. Odd it would choose that moment to go bad, but it happens. I've heard tales of BIOS viruses but that might be a stretch.

Tony

"Buy what you like, or you'll be forced to like what you buy"...me

 

[alfie1noakes]

He new he had one as it failed to boot much past POST, and then just left him with a DOS screen and the "boot sector virus found" I think, and the name of the virus.

When we went to format and re-install windows, we booted straight onto the CD drive, so the BIOS was all set to boot in the correct order.

I have a number of threads running on various forums, and it seems that most are pointing at it being a HW failure, mobo being the number 1 suspect..