Lattitude E6540 wont boot

Question

Hi all, Hopefully, you can help me out. Picked up a E6540 laptop mainly for the AMD graphics and upon booting, I'm getting a dead machine. The machine won't go to POST and all I get is the battery LED and power button constantly lite white. and the sound of the CDROM drives resettling itself. When I power down, the laptop spins up the CPU fan and then shuts down, but does not spin the fan when powering up. I thought it might have been a screen issue, but I've done tests recommended by Dell and it colour cycles, without any issue, so I assume the graphics side of the board is OK. Luckily I have another working E6540 machine and I have checked the CPU (i7), the ram, the HD, the battery, and the CDROM, and all have come up OK on the working machine. I've even swapped out the ram from the working machine and other items, including the CMOS battery and it's still not booting up. The strange part is that when I remove the ram from the laptop, it gives me a ram not installed error code. Anyone got any ideas would could be wrong, as I'm doubtful that the motherboard is dead?

ejn63 · Answer

You've pretty much eliminated every possibility other than that the system board is faulty. And it's very possible for a board to produce a RAM error with no memory attached, but not complete the power-on self test. The power rail to the RAM sockets is different than the ones to the CPU and other components - it's very possible the board is damaged in such a way that the CPU isn't receiving the power it needs, but it could just as well be one of a host of other issues.

Hopefully the system came with some sort of a DOA warranty -- return it to the seller for a refund. Otherwise, it looks like the AMD GPU boards for these run about $200-230.

First Name · Answer

Take out the battery and use a different power cord

Latitude

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