Laptop boot issue

[notadba]

Hi,

Any help would be appreciated. I have a netbook (Toshiba NB305 Windows 7). It stopped booting a few weeks back. On startup, machine powers, HDD starts reading then nothing - however fan still runs, keys light up etc. I tried the usual restarts, battery out, reset RAM etc. No avail. On a whim I tried plugging in a vga cable, and the machine booted and the display became active. All looked good, so tried to reboot without the vga and nothing. Display settings look ok, the Fn F5 toggle will not work, all drivers and updates are in, no viruses to report.

I tried the vga again and this appears to only work about every tenth time and have never been able to successfully reboot the machine twice in a row - so a little reluctant to try flashing the BIOS. When using the vga cable - it does not need to be connected to anything to trigger the bootup - appears just having something in the port makes it work.

Any ideas?

 

[rclarke250]

to see if this is a motherboard or hdd issue, I would remove the hdd, and try to boot, if you have a bootable usb thumb drive could see if it would start up reliably. If it doesn't, it's a system board, if it does, it's a bad hdd holding down the 5v line sometimes on boot. But it sounds more like a motherboard, if I was to guess.

 

[james1052]

Try different RAM, too.

 

[notadba]

Thanks for the feedback so far. Looks like it is a BIOS issue. Seems to be trying to default to a vga driver on start. Only problem is that I can rarely get it to start consistently to get in and change it. Also without ever achieving 2 successful boots in a row, I am not keen to try flashing the bios. Any ideas?

 

[goombawaho]

HOw have you determined that it's a BIOS issue. Doesn't really sound like that to me.
Reset BIOS to defaults, SAVE, Reboot. Then if it doesn't work, start thinking mobo.

Are there any diagnostic CDs that came with it OR built-in diagnostic partition OR diagnostics you can download and burn?

I thought our little wild time had just begun.

 

[kestrel1]

Had a similar problem with a Toshiba recently.
It would work fine with an external monitor via VGA cable, but nothing on the laptop screen.
What I did was to remove the graphics driver completely & reboot. I then got the laptop screen working, all be it with a standard driver. I then downloaded the latest driver & installed it. This seemed to sort it mostly, but then I discovered that the cable from the mobo to the screen was faulty. Got a replacement for £8.00 off of ebay & the machine is happy again.
Removed viruses that were present & returned it to the customer.
Cant see it being the mobo to be honest. You may also find it is the screens inverter or the screen itself.
Hope that helps.