Hi, sorry to hear about the problems with the machine you were given. Friends who take laptops apart and break things are almost as bad for laptops as feeding them a diet of orange juice!
Almost anything can be got working again, its just a question of resources……how much money and time can you throw at it etc….
Liquid damage (and friends) can be responsible for a large amount of laptop mortality, but having said that it is easy to damage brittle plastic parts when disassembling or reassembling them, even in the most professional and best equipped workshops.
If you are looking at this from a hobby perspective, or a learning exercise then the steps I suggest are as follows:
1 Search for and download the owners manual, and the service manual for the machine.
2 Re seat all the RAM, and clean the contacts, always do this on a laptop that's in trouble as the first of your diagnostic procedures, but take all personal safety and ESD precautions, always remove the mains power cord and remove the battery, before undoing anything! If there are two memory modules remove one and see if it boots, then try switching them and try again, finally install fresh RAM (easy in the workshop!) but a private owner may need to borrow some from a chum! Make sure its the right type compatible etc.
Note laptops generally have memory modules installed under a cover plate in the bottom of the laptop accessed from underneath it but some also have an additional memory slot underneath the keyboard………(they don't like orange juice, seeping through and motherboards feel the same way!)
3, Try to boot with the battery removed just with the mains power cable plugged in.
4 Gently move the mains power plug where it plugs into the laptop from side to side and up and down…see if anything changes LED's Fans etc (The power jacks on a lot of laptops are mechanically weak and any excess strain can result in damage. As some LED's are lit you can assume that the power supply
(voltage dropper) is OK, other wise check it with a meter for the correct output. (I always check anyway!)
5 Connect an external VDU to the laptop see if you can get an image appearing, if the friend broke the hinges he may have also trapped or broken the video cable (they can be quite delicate)
To use the external VDU there may be a key combination to activate it (often F5 or F6 sometimes with the Fn key (see owners manual for full details)
6 You have already checked the hard drive and it seems to be mechanically sound, so make sure its replaced correctly and is making a snug contact in all the right places.
7 Try an external keyboard (USB) and see if this helps (boot up is often stopped on a keyboard error)…that orange juice again!
8 Try a new laptop keyboard (if you can find one.)
9 If your machine will not now go into the BIOS then things are not looking too good for a simple repair………
10 its worth trying a live distro of Puppy (Linux), burn it as an image to a CD and try booting from that, instructions available from here:
http://forums.whatthetech.com/Please_help_…041#entry637041
its in post 5. If Puppy wont run then its quite possibly it's a hardware fault that needs further investigation.
The 10 steps above should give you a good guide to help you decide if you want to proceed.
Post back if you need further steps
regards
paws
