Toshiba Satellite always boots to a black screen

xcom923 · 20 Jul 2013

OK first off I'm sorry that this ends up being my first post. I work in IT as my day job but I know more about the quirks of machines I've been dealing with for years. Anyway I have a friend with a Toshiba Satellite A665-S5176x and it will look like it's booting fine and then it shows nothing but a cursor and a black background. BEFORE any of you suggest anything please look over what I've done (listing in order)

1. Tried to boot in safe-mode (same thing)
2. Tried window 7 disk (wouldn't show anything besides black screen...so no system repair)
3. Tried to boot normally and the PC BSOD'd and then rebooted...then blank screen
4. removed HDD and put it in my laptop where it booted just fine (so not a software issue)
5. Looked for mini-dump to see if BSOD info was present...no such luck
5. since I had my HDD out anyway I put it in the toshiba to see what would happen, it black screen'd as well.
6. reset bios to default...nothing changed

At some point I saw an error mentioning a hardware failure but I don't remember when I saw it. More importantly if anyone has any other suggestions I'm willing to try them. I'm at a loss here

Faladu · 20 Jul 2013

So you get the usual POST and then it just goes to the wonderful Black Hole of Death, right?

No other messages whatsoever.... but at least eliminated the inverter (backlight) as being toast since you did get POST.

Ideas:

Reseat the RAM and clean the contacts.

Clean the inside of the laptop out including all the fans + intakes of dust bunnies.

I'd remove the CPU heatsink and redo the thermal paste with Artic MX-4 (best available), same for the chipset's heatsink if applicable.

I would put in a trusty Linux Live CD (I use Linux Mint's) and of course set the bios to boot off the DVD drive and see if that WORKS or not. [If it can't handle that, then you know it's a shot motherboard, which is the likely scenario, since the video is integrated.]

Could check the voltage on the power supply with a multimeter, also, make sure it's not shot.

See where you are at after those things.....

xcom923 · 20 Jul 2013

I didn't mention this but I did reset the RAM (it may have been after this post) as for the live CD I did think about that but my thought process was, if a windows setup disk won't work why would mint? the fan looks clean (visual inspection) but I don't have any extra thermal paste to to try to reset the cpu heatsink nor have I ever done that on a laptop and since it's not mind I'd be liable to make things worse possibly. As for the multi-meter I don't have one of those but if it was an issue with power wouldn't the power down. What's weird is that it still runs and the cursor is there just nothing else.

I'll try the mint disk next to see if that helps though since that's my best option at this point.