Hi everyone,

I have a Prostar 5694 with a Pentium 4 2.2 GHz processor and a 40 Gigabyte 4200 rpm hard drve. This Laptop also has the Raydon mobility 7500 64 MB graphics card and 512 Megabytes of DDR RAM as well as a DVD/CDRW combo drive. Anyway the trouble just started a few weeks ago. I'm not sure if its because I upgraded to XP Pro from 2kPro or if its a concidence. The trouble I'm having is this. When I turn the power on to the laptop nothing happens on the LCD and I mean nothing. The only thing that I hear is the CD ROM drive spin up and sometimes the cooling fans kicking on. Now this has happened before since I upgraded to XP Pro a few weeks back but after powering off and on a few times it normaly started up fine. This time however it is not. I must of tried to restart it 100 times! I'm starting to think it may be dead. One more thing that I noticed when I'm booting is that it makes some kind of starnge low beep. Can anyone out there help? Thanks a lot,

ditmx6

Laptops are usually proprietary. Your first stop is tech support from the manufacturer.

Yes thanks but I already tried that route and they are not open today. Does anyone else have any ideas?

Thanks,

ditmx6

try hookingt it up to an external monitor and see if it boots. If you can at least get to your BIOS you could try using the rescue disk, but you run the chance of erasing files. Your best bet (because of the propreitary nature of laptops and their fragility) would be to wait until you can get manufacturer support.

Thanks for the reply superdrumr. I tried to do as you said with an external monitor but with the same results. I'm starting to think that the motherboard might of died. If that is true do you know if I would be able to salvage the data on the hard drive by hooking it up to another laptop that I buy? In other words can I add a second hard drive to most laptops and are most laptop hard drives compatable with the various laptop companies? Thanks again,

ditmx6

you probably cant add the second hard drive, but you can pull out the hard drive from that one and use a converter kit (20 bucks at the most from just about any computer store) to hook it up to a desktop machine.

Add on to that:
Hard drives in laptops are just like hard drives in desktops in that they are compatible across the board. The only difference is that laptop hard drives are only 2.5" across (instead of 3") and they are shorter too to accomodate the tighter space of a laptop.
Also their connecter is 44 pins instead of the normal 40 and carries power as well as data.
The converter will allow you to hook up a standard IDE cable and a molex connector.

First thing to do is look up the beep codes for your laptop. The code should then tell you which component(s) is/are failing. There may be more than one troubleshooting option for the code though.

I recently had the joy of troubleshooting an old Thinkpad 600 that would boot, but wouldn't go any further than the BIOS setup. There were three different things that the code pointed to. I chose the cheapest route first...turned out it was the CMOS battery. (Of course, this realization only occurred after I had torn the machine completely down) The machine is going strong again.

If you didn't have any beeps or the machine doesn't start up the ROM or fans, then it's most likely that the PSU died. However, you are getting some sort of error code, so see if you can look it up on the manufacturer's website or in the manual for the machine.

Good luck.

Wow, i had that exact same experience with an ibm 600.

Thanks to everyone who replied. I've been out of town for the past day so I haven't been able to keep up with the posts. Unfortunately that beeping that I told you about earlier only happens intermitantly and I dont' even know if I would go as far as to call it a beep. What I do hear occasionally is a very very low tone that only lasts for part of a second. But I'm starting to think that this is a system board problem.

I guess I'll go out and buy one of those converter kits that you suggested and try to salvage the data from it. That will help me out very much and I want thank you very much for that suggestion.

If anyone else out there has any other suggestions I would greatly appreciate them.


Thanks again,

Ditmx6

Have you checked with the manufacturer/supplier yet? Surely a machine this new is still under warranty.
Before doing anything else, I'd go down this route - at least contact their tech support and see what the score is.

Actually I did try to get in touch with Prostar's tech support number. But I was forwarded to an answering machine that said no one was available to take my call and to leave a message so they could get back to me. This was over 5 hours ago! I've pretty much given up on them for any kind of help (not that they have ever been any). In fact ever time that I have ever called them it was nothing but trouble.

Amazingly enough my laptop booted up when I was starting to tear it apart to dig out the hard drive. While I was opening up the case I accidentally hit the power button and it started up fine!!! So now I'm burning all of the data that I want from it to CDs. I know that as soon as I try to start it up again it will be toast. Anyone out there have any clues?

Thanks,

ditmx6