X40 won't post

[dwilsonfl]

All I'm getting is the battery light and the circle/Z. The fan is running but after 5 minutes that's all. How should I go about discovering what is wrong?

Thanks,

David

[rkawakami]

If there's nothing on the screen that could mean several things:

- CCFL is burned out
- inverter is bad
- ribbon cable is bad
- power to the inverter has been interrupted; bad fuse, stuck lid switch, other motherboard issue
- LCD has been turned off through a BIOS setting
- some other problem with the system causing the no-boot condition

I'd start with the easy things first: connect an external monitor, power up the system and press the F1 key several times to force the system into BIOS. If there's nothing on the external monitor, press the Fn+F7 key combination a couple of times. If there's still nothing, then there's something more than CCFL/inverter issues going on. Could be that a bad component in the system is hanging it during boot. Remove everything that's in sockets (memory too) and see if you at least get the 1-3-3-1 beep code for bad/missing memory. If so, then plug one module back in the system and re-boot. If that gets the laptop going, keep re-installing one item at a time. I'd start with the MiniPCI card first as a bad card can hang a system like you describe.

[dwilsonfl]

Did just as you suggested. Got nothing on the external monitor. Then took everything out and added them back one by one. Now it works just as it should. Maybe something got jostled or the wireless card has an intermittent fault that has never manifested until now.

Regardless, thank you, thank you, thank you.