Member Avatar for lewashby

My brothers laptop recently died, I believe due to a failed hard drive because when you turned it on you couldn't get out of the BIOS. I unscrewed the laptop's bottom from it's keyboard and replaced the hard drive but now it won't even turn on at all, I can't even get a BIOS screen. The only thing that I could visibly see that went wrong when I opened it was two ribbon cables came undone. One was very skinny and the other was wider and they went from the mother board to right under the laptop finger pad. I believe I plugged both of them back in correctly but I'm dead in the water. Any ideas or suggestions?

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Common causes when a laptop goes from “worked before I opened it” to “no POST at all” are physical: mis-seated ZIF/flex cables, damaged connector pins or pads, a short from a loose screw/standoff, or a disturbed power-button circuit. Visual inspection with good light or a loupe for torn conductor traces, lifted solder pads, bent pins, or missing insulation is the fastest way to rule out obvious damage. Echoing and , simple power-discharge and independent verification of any boot media are useful early checks, but they don’t replace a careful hardware inspection.

A conservative diagnostic order that separates hardware from firmware/OS problems:

  • Remove all nonessential devices (HDD/SSD, optical, USB) and try power-only POST indicators (LEDs, fan, speaker/beeps).
  • Reseat RAM (try single stick in primary slot) and all accessible ribbon cables; when inserting a ribbon, open the ZIF latch, align the contacts, push fully to the stop, then close the latch — don’t force it.
  • Check the DC jack and adapter output with a meter; look for burnt components or loose jack solder joints.
  • If power-button behavior is suspect, check the cable/connector for continuity or momentarily short the two power-on pads on the board (only if comfortable and with ESD care) to rule out a failed button assembly.

If firmware/GRUB appears but the installer goes to a black screen, the most common cause is video/kernel-mode issues or boot-mode mismatch. Create the USB with a reliable writer (Etcher/Rufus dd mode) and test it on another PC. Try booting with safe-graphics or add the kernel option nomodeset (edit the GRUB linux line and add nomodeset in place of quiet splash) to avoid GPU driver hangs. Reference the service manual for model-specific power-test points and always observe ESD precautions when probing.

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Member Avatar for rproffitt

Try a very common reset. Unplug power, remove battery, hold power button for 60 seconds, release, slip in battery, apply power, wait a few seconds and then try again.

You may want to remove the HDD and retry.

Member Avatar for rubberman

Can you boot from CD/DVD/USB drive?

Member Avatar for lewashby

I'll give that a try rproffitt. No rubberman, it's like that power button isn't even connected to anything, absolutly nothing happens when you press the button.

Member Avatar for lewashby

update

It was an issue with power button/motherboard ribbon cable. I have now fixed that issue but I'm still having problems. The laptop has a new 250 GB Samsung SSD in it and I wrote the ISO for Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon to a USB and fired the laptop up with that in the USB port in hopes of installing the Mint OS onto the new SSD. When the laptop turns on GRUB comes up with the option of starting in Mint but after pressing Enter the screen goes black and nothing happens. Any ideas here? Thanks again everyone.

Member Avatar for rproffitt

L,
Be sure that bootable USB works in another PC. I lost a day fussing about USB boot and I had the old YDIAW issue. Back to the web for another way to create the USB and it was working.

This doesn't mean you may have other issues such as dealing wth UEFI.

Member Avatar for lewashby

I'm googling UEFI right now. If it was a UEFI issue would that be a problem with the USB stick or the laptop? I did notice that when I tried to format my USB sticks in Gparted this is what I get when it first fires up.

/dev/sdf contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table. However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should. Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT partition tables. Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table, and are now using an msdos partition table. Is this a GPT partition table?

Does that tell us anything?

Member Avatar for rproffitt

Formatting sticks? GPT? It sounds like the sticks were not made using prior advice on web pages that have those distros.

While we need to know our PC in regards to UEFI and BIOS settings what you wrote makes me wonder if you made a good bootable stick. Test? Does it boot in other PCs?

Member Avatar for lewashby

Update, I reformatted the USB stick and instead of buring the Mint image on it I burned the Ubuntu image on it and now it's working fine. Go figure. Thanks.

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