Inspiron 6000 Freezes at BIOS Screen, Can't Access BIOS

Question

I'm fairly knowledgable about hardware, but this issue has me stumped. I'm leaning toward it being a motherboard defect, but I'd like to get some feedback. Hopefully some experts can shed some light on the problem. I acquired an Inspiron 6000 recently, without the AC power adapter, but the battery has a charge. When you press the power button (on battery power), the panel green lights come on, the fan comes on, the optical drive lights up, and the black BIOS/Boot screen appears and the white BIOS progress bar makes its way across the screen from left to right. There are no beeps during this time. About 7/8ths across the screen, the white progress bar stops/freezes and goes no further. Pressing the F2 and/or F10 keys does nothing at this point. However, if you press the F2 key earlier in the process, the 'Preparing to enter Setup...' message appears at the top right of the screen, but nothing further happens, the white bar freezes at the same spot and that's it. Before I go into what I've tried to remedy the situation, I need to report that all 4 of the laptop's USB ports are broken, that is, they are all missing the black plastic tab that's normally in a USB port. I'm not sure how all 4 of them managed to get broken, but c'est la vie. Anyway, I plugged a USB keyboard into all 4 ports, and when I plugged it into the top port on the right side panel of the laptop, the screen went off and then the laptop shut down. I tried it again, wiggled the USB plug a little, and the same thing happened. The laptop would start right back up when the power button was pressed and would freeze as usual (provided nothing was plugged into that bad USB port). As for relevant hardware, the laptop has a 2.0GHz Centrino cpu, 40GB hard drive, 512MB of RAM (1 stick), 15.4' WXGA display and a 64MB non-integrated ATI video card. The only thing I've done to try and remedy the BIOS freeze problem is swap the RAM with a known good stick, which made no difference. I've taken the laptop completely apart, down to removing the motherboard, and didn't see anything unusual, was pretty clean, no bad dust accumulations in or around the fans and vents, and the DC power jack appears solid. One thing I should have done while it was apart was remove the CMOS battery, I'll probably try that shortly, leave it out for a half hour or so. Keep in mind, powering up the laptop so far has been done strictly from the battery, I'm in the process of acquiring an AC adapter, and will test with that later today. The original owner had a tech. person examine the laptop when it exhibited this problem, and it appears he/she disassembled the laptop and told her it was probably the motherboard that was the problem, possibly due to a dust/overheating issue. It may be an issue with the motherboard, but I don't think it's due to overheating. What confuses me is that I usually associate motherboard problems with power problems, like the computer won't power up at all or shuts down shortly after power on or intermittently. This motherboard is definitely supplying power to everything when you press the power button, and doesn't shut down, things just freeze right before the end of the POST process, before Windows XP loads. Any ideas? Are the bad USB ports causing the problem, especially the one that apparently has a short and causes the laptop to shut down when something is plugged in? Obviously, a replacement motherboard is in order, since there are currently no working USB ports and they are all soldered directly on the motherboard. Thanks, looking forward to your responses!

Davet50 · Answer

You need a new motherboard. If you cannot find one on E bay then My recommendation would be to move on. For the price of a new motherboard you can get a new system.

I believe the USB ports being broken are not a good sign and a in all likely hood the problem. When the computer is posting it is looking at the USB ports and in not finding them or finding them in a unknown state it is hanging.

The fact that you also do not have a charger is another cost that IMHO is not worth it.

Laptops are not like a desktop when it comes to troubleshooting motherboard problems the big issue is the having to mostly disassemble the thing just to get to components.

Gondo · Answer

Thanks for the reply. You pretty much confirmed what I thought, that the broken USB ports have messed things up and a new motherboard is the only solution to get it working again. As I said, c'est la vie...

Locked Topics – Laptops General

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