A31 has a green LED, but it makes no attempt to boot..

[mqarkcambie]

Hi,

I bought (dirt cheap) a knackered A31 as a fixer-upper.
It was obviously dropped as it had a physically knackered DVD Rom drive in the left hand drive bay, and the screen is cracked. (I've got a working replacement top including screen on it's way)

When I power it up I get the green power on LED, it can and did charge the battery fully and the processor fan spins happily. Other than that I get nothing, nada, nicht, zip etc. There's no POST style beeping (should there be on a thinkpad?) and if I connect a VGA monitor I get no real VGA signal. On some monitors it looks like there's some voltage coming out of the VGA connector - but not enough of a real signal to turn the power led of the monitor green.

I suspect somethings up with the motherboard as I get no basic pre OS style PC activity from it. I've stripped it down to the mother board level and re-seated the processor, done a visual inspection on the board etc and it looks fine. The case and LCD came off worse by the look of it.

One thing is that I don't have an origional IBM configured HDD in it. I've just stuck a basic formatted winxp booting drive in there to see if it will at least try to boot and then die. but no obvious booting. I do get the HDD LED, but it's solid green and the disk doesn't seem to spin or start spitting out data.

Also I haven't currently got the correct PSU for it, so I'm sticking in 12 volts which isn't the specified 16 volts on the underside of the unit. Would this be the root of my problems? I just took a chance, and I got a working power LED.

The machine is a nice spec for the price, and has 2 x 256 MB ram, Wifi, CD-RW + DVD Rom drive and I'd love to start using it as a real laptop if possible. I don't really want to break it for parts to sell on ebay if I can help it.

Would a second user mobo be my only option - or is there something special about the default setup of the A31 that I'm missing.