My Dell Latitude laptop fails to boot on A/C power as well as battery power
I have a Dell Latitude CPi R laptop. This laptop fails to boot on A/C power as well as battery power. When I switch on the laptop the power light comes on and the hard drive light blinks once and after 2-3 seconds the system shuts down. The display never comes up nor does the system fan start. In case of a floppy drive inside I can hear the click sound of it trying to access the drive just before the laptop shuts down. I completely disassembled the laptop and checked all the connections thoroughly but the problem remains.
I would test the AC adapter first. I think it’s possible that the adapter is bad and the battery is discharged. Try to remove the battery, plug in the AC adapter and start the laptop without the battery installed. Then I would try to install a test memory module or at least reseat it. Does is make any difference?
If nothing helps, you can minimize the system as much as possible and try to start it with an external monitor. Normally you need only 3 components to successfully boot a laptop and see if you have some basic functionality. These components are the system board, the CPU and the memory module. Leave only these three components and connect an external monitor. Now try turn on the laptop. You should a video on the external monitor. If you still have no video and the system still shuts down, then one of the three components is bad. I would try to swap the memory first and if it doesn’t help then most likely you have a bad system board.
About 2 weeks ago I had to repair a HP laptop with similar problems. I was able bring it back to live after I reseated the video cable on the LCD screen. The cable was half way out.
October 11th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
My Dell Vostro has been working fine the tonight I plugged it in to charge and it ceased all activity. No led lights flashing indicating power and it will not turn on, seems completely dead. Any thoughts?
June 14th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Hi, my laptop speakers have just blown up and i dont know what to do, please help.
May 15th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Man,
There could be a problem with laptop memory. I posted some suggestions here: My laptop does not start or turns on and freezes
May 15th, 2009 at 7:59 am
My Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop will not start for few days
and then after few days later when I tried give another shot to restart. it does bootup then after few click it freezs and can turn off and boot up again.
so far I managed to boot up but in middel of boot up it freez.
However, when I try to turn it back on, nothing happens. The screen doesn’t turn on, the fan doesn’t turn on. The only thing that happens is the LED lights turn on briefly.
I tried turning it on with and with out the battery and I get the same result.
any help?
April 15th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I was given a latitude c/640and it will now boot up at all with the harddrive, cd rom, and battery removed 19.95 volts out of ac adapter when you push the start button the middle light flashes 10 times and everything shuts down. With the battery in it does the same thing but the battery charge light comes back on and stays on for about 1 1/2 to 3 minutes and then go’s out any ideas? I have read throught some of the forums and find a lot of similaritys but nothing that makes sense to me. thanks for your time.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Dude, It’s your memory……
March 25th, 2009 at 3:30 am
I have a similr problem with my HP pavillion laptop I have the laptop with the battery in plugged into the powerlead I press the on button the computer starts all lights come on and I can here the fan starts also but after 1 second the computer just turns off no display ever comes up at all some times if I leave the laptop plugged into the power for a while it might start but that is not a permanant soloution any ideas ?
March 16th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Just wanted to contribute since I found this thread helpful. Had a 600M on the bench for upgrade finished installing all the new software and and OS flawlessly. After four days of sitting on the bench running I turned it off. Today I go and grab it for the client and the exact problem as originally described here in the start of this thread. I had all the lights blinking more or less lit up really but you could still tell there was some slight blinking to it and she sounds like she was powering up, then boom totally dead. nothing. Check power power supply, HDD, external devices, memory * (I put a start there for a reason, we’ll get back to that) and battery. No success but HDD clears diag on the test bench and so does the memory and battery. Known working power adapter still yielded the same results. After reading this thread, specifically about the power button and having to press really hard I gave it a go. Sure enough she started to boot more than before but then the cap lock light blinked 3 times and she shut right down. This of course is the memory indicator and sure enough after re checking my modules I determined I had not properly reseated one of them. Closed her back up and mashed the the power key nice and hard and Voila, she’s back up and running. The power key is definitely jacked and I can tell it just by physical touch. The memory error I created myself in the process of trying to solve things. This power button design is very poor in my opinion, and I had to physically take apart the chassis in order to remove some debris and worn plastic in the actual mechanism.
Nothing more than a mechanical failure are a result of poor engineering……..
Hope this is helpful
February 4th, 2009 at 10:04 am
One more thing on my post above:
I have tried booting with and without the battery on AC power and attached to a D-Port replicator – no difference.
February 4th, 2009 at 10:02 am
I have a Dell Latitude D820 – working good for over a year. I turned it off before Jan 1 and when I turned it back on it would not boot. It would turn on, see the screen where the progress bar is, but it stops at the first part of the progress bar – a few times it has gotten past that point, but then Windows says there is an error and offers to boot into Safe mode, but booting into Safe mode or normal mode fails and it comes around to the BIOS and the POST progress bar it hangs again. I have not gotten it past the POST progress bar for weeks now.
I have tested with a different HD that I know is working and no change.
I have replaced memory – no change.
What should be the next steps here?
Could it be a BIOS version issue? (BIOS Version A07).
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
December 10th, 2008 at 1:27 am
had a similar problem with my dell inspiron 3700. here’s how i solved it:
opened up the laptop case, unplugged all cable connections, then plugged them back in. my dell is humming fine again…
thanks guys for your pointers.
November 4th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
My Dell Latitude D410 laptop will not start AT ALL…
I was working on some homework when all of a sudden the screen just froze. This is the first time that my laptop ever froze, so I just decided to turn it off and turn it back on again.
However, when I tried to turn it back on, nothing happens. The screen doesn’t turn on, the fan doesn’t turn on. The only thing that happens is the LED lights turn on briefly and the CAPS LOCK light flashes ten times. After the 10th time, the laptop completely shuts down again.
I tried turning it on with and with out the battery and I get the same result. I am really freaking out here…I’ve had this laptop close to 2 years with ZERO problems…can anyone HELP me!?!
Thank you in advance for your help.
October 15th, 2008 at 8:53 am
i have that problem i tride a new operating system that dident work i replaced the hard drive that dident work. but pressing down hard on the keybord and ont the back underneth the keybourd worked every time i also found tilting it worked a lot too.
September 6th, 2008 at 1:19 am
I think it is the ram memory, try reseat it or replace it, try only to run in one memory slot, it can be the one of the slots in systemboard that is broken?!
good luck
August 26th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Chilena,
I would run memory and hard drive test first. You can test memory with Memtest86+ and hard drive with Hitachi’s DFT. I linked to both utilities in “Useful Links” on the right side.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Myke,
Could be memory problem. Try reconnecting the memory module, move it to another slot. Try replacing memory with another know good module.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Pam Sorooshian,
Could be heat related problem. It’s possible the laptop shuts down because of overheating. Can you hear the cooling fan working before the laptop shuts down? Maybe the fan is bad. Make sure the heat sink is clean and there is no dust inside. You can clean the heat sink with compressed air.
August 25th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I have a Dell Latitude D600. It doesn’t seem to want to boot up. It was working fine for a couple of days. But the internet was being crazy and not loading certain things. So I restarted it and I haven’t been able to even get to the desktop since. I’ve tried running the PSI test, everything passes. No safe modes work either. It loads a bit on the Windows screen, then freezes, flashes the blue screen for half a second, then tries to restart again. Pressing down in the middle of the keyboard doesn’t seem to work either. Help me please.
August 21st, 2008 at 8:13 am
Dell Inspiron 6400 won’t boot up – only the power LED stays on after pressing it. All other LEDs go off. There is power in the DVD drive because i can open it up with the button. also the harddrive seems to be spinning.
the screen stays blank and the harddrive activity LED also stays off.
Anyone with any solutions.
August 20th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Dell Inspiron B130 — battery doesn’t charge, computer starts up normally when it is plugged in (with or without battery), but suddenly shuts itself off after about 5 minutes or so (sometimes a little more time, sometimes a little less time). Then it won’t start up at all – no response to power button. I leave it sitting for a while – 20 minutes, say, and then, again, it starts up seemingly normally and then shuts itself off after five minutes or so.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
My Dell Latitude Laptop won’t boot up and is displaying a white screen with
> message saying it is protected by a password authentication system, and I
> cannot access the data without correct password. It then asks that I type
> “primary or administration password”. I have neither of these as I bought
> laptop used with no paperwork.
June 28th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I Have a similar problem with my Dell Latitude D610, I Have Reseated the video cable but the problem is still perssistent.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:33 am
hi i have an HP pavilion N3410 windows 98 running win XP and it has an AMDK6 2 processor, and it was working fine up untill 2 days ago, when i took it apart to replace the nonworking fan, now the power light comes on along with the cd drive light which shortly goes off, and very faintly i can see the hard drive light flash/and or stay steady. i can also hear the new fan as well as the hard drive whirring, there is no monitor display as far as i can tell, then after 5 seconds or so, it just cuts off, what can i do? i dont want to spend bunches of money( no more than i have to) please help , Kotik
April 21st, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Marshall,
I think it’s bad motherboard. This problem is not related to RAM or hard drive as someone mentioned in comments to your youtube video.
I don’t think it’s related to the CMOS battery either. The laptop should start even if the CMOS battery is missing.
Most likely bad motherboard. If you decide to replace it yourself, you can use this manual.
April 21st, 2008 at 8:57 pm
I have a Dell B130 and I got a blue screen of death one day, something about a driver IRQ or something along those lines. I didn’t think nothing of it and powered the laptop off and it hasn’t been the same since. Now when I press the power button, the top three lights blink once and the power button stays on for about 3 seconds then goes off. The fan or cd drive don’t make any noise and there is nothing that comes up on the screen. I thought it was broke for sure so I set it aside for 2 months until one day I got bored and pressed the power button and the laptop started up and worked fine! After 2 days the laptop shut off and started with the problems again. I have gotten the laptop to start up 3 times since then but it will shut off after about a day of use. I made a video of my problem. http://youtube.com/watch?v=Wm8tPww9rKs
Any help would be appreciated!!
This is the closest problem I had and did all this person did to try and fix it.
1.When i turn ON the power LED it turns on and turns off after 2 seconds.
2.Tried using battery alone and AC adapter alone.still the same condition.
3.Reseated the Ram modules also.Still the problem exists.
4.Sometimes the laptop would turn ON and work smoothly and sometimes it would not start as described above.
February 25th, 2008 at 6:49 am
Follow up on Inspiron 600m:
I replaced the whole power button assembly (top panel and circuit board interface) – not difficult really – but it did not solve the problem with the button not reliably initiating a power-up from sleep or off condition.
After reading Richard’s post above (Aug. 30), that really seems like what’s going on. Mechanical pressure on the keyboard etc. does play a role in this problem, and is often the only way that I can get the machine to power up. Thanks Richard!
It will be some time before I can attempt that repair – I’ve since purchased a new HP dv2715nr notebook ($580), which I love – so it’s not as urgent for me now.
BTW, on a separate topic, for transferring data from a HDD (which I had to do on the Inspiron) I used Drive Image XML. An awesome FREE program that copied a fully bootable exact image of the old laptop HDD onto a new one.
February 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am
ramona,
Here’s how you can transfer data from the laptop hard drive to another computer. I would try using external USB enclosure for notebook hard drives.
February 21st, 2008 at 8:53 am
Hello,
I have a Compaq Presario C306 and my laptop will not stay on. I had an AC adapter that I had plugged into my laptop, and all of a sudden, while I was listening to some music, the power button, power indicator light and charge indicator light on my laptop started flickering (like when I light bulb is about to go out) and then my computer just shut off. The AC adapter no longer worked, so I went out and bought another one. I plugged that one in, turned on my laptop, and it brought up the Windows XP screen, and almost completely loaded my desktop as normal (fan working, hard drive working and all like normal) and then it did the flickering thing again and shut off. I thought that maybe the internal battery was just really drained, so I left the new AC adapter plugged in all night to see if it would charge. The next morning I tried it again and the lights flickered a little bit, but it didn’t come up. As soon as I unplugged the AC adapter, the computer went completely dead. At least when the AC adapter is plugged in, the charge light comes on like the laptop is charging. After I try to turn it on, it starts the flickering again. I removed the laptop battery and tried to boot up the computer with the AC adapter and that didn’t work, still the flickering. I did notice that the laptop battery had a little white corrosive powder on it, but that was easily just blown away. I really need the data off of my computer, so I’m hoping all is not lost. Help!
December 28th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Hey everyone,
I had the problem where when you press the power button the lights would blink briefly and then the laptop would turn off. Tried a bunch of things with no luck, and thanks to topdoghockey I finally tried a new power adapter. Boom! Laptop started working normally again.
I should know better – always check the cables first! Anyways, thanks topdoghockey =)
October 13th, 2007 at 7:43 am
Hey.
I have a Dell Latitude and i am having a problem getting the computer to come on. The LED lights will come on, but if the power adapter is not plugged in, they stay on and wont turn off. At all. I had to remove the battery to cut the power. None of the computer actually starts though. If the power adapter is plugged in, then the battery light comes on like it is charging. I press the power button, but it comes on for a second, then flashes and just goes back to the battery light. I have changed power adapters, and batterys and have tried booting without the battery in. Nothing seems to work. Any tips?