Laptop Help

[JasonC]

Hi all.

Im repairing a laptop for someone, but it has me stumpted.

Its an old Acer Aspire 7520.

Its running witndows 7.

When I switch it on, the laptop goes onto the Acer splash screen at first screen, then it goes black, with a continuous flashing dash, it then just hangs there. I cannot Ctrl + Alt + Del, I can only press and hold the power button.

The hard drive seems fine, it shows up in the bios fine, and I plugged it into my machine and copied their data off and had no issues.

The DVD drive is faulty I believe, I cannot open the drive when I've turned the power on, the light continually flashes / blinks, throughout the whole time the screen is black also. The hard drive activity light blinks continually also.

I plugged in a USB dvd drive and tried to boot off that, it spins up when I turn the laptop on, but then does nothing, doesn't attempt to boot off it even though I set it to in the Bios.

I don't know what to do, I cannot boot off the hard drive, or boot off the DVD drive, internal or external.

I was thinking maybe faulty ram, but I have no way to test, I dont have any spare and I cant boot off my memory testing application.

The dvd drive doesn't show up in the bios either.

The ram shows up fine in the bios also.

I don't know what else to do.

The bios can see the hard drive but it doesn't even make an attempt to boot from it, and the hard drive is working fine.

Please help.

Jason

[JasonC]

Also, while the hard drive was plugged into my laptop, I ran chkdsk through command promt and didnt find any problems with the hard drive.

I removed the ram and installed them 1 at a time and there was no issues there either.

I also put in an old hard drive with an operating system on and it made no attempt to boot from it.

Jason

[Detection]

You're fixing a laptop but don't have any spare ram to test ? That's generally the first thing to try, although in this case as it lets you into the BIOS it should also try to boot I would have thought

Reset the BIOS ?

Remove the faulty DVD drive and see if it boots, should be a screw underneath holding it in place, then stick a pin into the small hole on the front of the DVD draw to pop it open, then pull it completely out of the machine

See 7m20s for DVD removal

[Hum]

RAM -- you need to have another stick to test if that is the problem

BIOS may need reflashed

Bad video chip, perhaps

[JasonC]

Forgot to say that I took the DVD drive out and tried booting but still had the same problem.

I will try resetting the bios.

Cheers, Jason

[Detection]

What happens if you try to boot with no HDD installed? Does it complain about no boot disk or do the same thing ?

Try booting with no battery in too, basically remove everything you can to narrow down the hardware left which could be the problem

[JasonC]

Also forgot to add that I tried booting without a HDD and CD drive, same problem happens.

I've tried clearing the cmos... still no different. Loaded defaults in the bios, no change.

Tried plugging directly into the mains and removing the battery and still the same.

I've about alot of people having problems with there laptops, which was caused by the motherboard, but I'm having different issues to what others are having.

Its an Acer aspire 7520.

Cheers, Jason