Another Packard Bell Laptop Turns up at Chephrenrepairs.com and the customer says " its my husbands and it said it had a virus on it," and the man at chephrenrepairs.com says hold your horses mamm, what software said that!!? The customer said "Oh i think there was Norton something on there and it needed renewing, it said ther was a virus on the laptop...., she went on...... and now there is no screen it is just black!"

We discovered that when you turn on the laptop that you hear the fan whiring and it seems to stay on but like the lady said: absolutely nothing appears on the laptop screen...... it just remains very black indeed......
We decided to remove the disk and attach it to a special device to look at it, and we discovered that there are two NTFS partitions on it of different sizes we also discovered that the disk seems to sound as if it is spining correctly, you can often tell a lot about a disk by simply litening to it.

Next we did a few things, use the disk checker in Windows XP, you know the one you see if you open my computer and right click on the disk partition icon and then choose check disk and tick the two boxes in the dialog box. Both tests completed and seemed ok, we then used a little program you find in the CMD prompt called chkdsk to check out the partitions on the Segate 80 gb 3.5 inch drive. We noticed no bad sectors so that was that as they say....

Next we tried booting the laptop with the battery in, and with it out, and then we attached a video lead to the external port of the lap top..... why do that you may ask...? Well, most laptops wil be able to send the output of the video to the external port on the laptop instead of to the laptop screen. In order to do that you usually press the fn key plus the key that has a picture of a screen on it..... it varies from laptop to laptop a bit....
Anyway we found it was impossible to get a signal to the monitor........ (suffice it to say we did check out that the video cable and the monitor work properly)

Further more we noticed that when you do turn on the laptop that you hear no posting beep at all, we listned for it...... at his point we paused for thought....... We know that the power supply must not be dead because you can hear the fan werring like it really means it..... is seems quite likley that the motherboard is damaged...... we know that most motherboards have the graphics chip on the motherboard itself normally soldered permanently to it, not plugged in to a socket......... in this case it seems that it may be more than just the graphics chip failing as there is no beep from the laptop when you turn it on.....

We decided to look on the internet for a motherboard, but this machine is old probably over 6 years old and we found mostly motherboards that are faulty.... if the machine was a bit newer and also a slightly higher specification we might consider fitting a new motherboard to it..... Finally we admitted that given the age of the beast and the apparent lack of working motherboards and the fact that the spec of the laptop was not really that high it was not worth trying to fit a new mother board to it.......... and that folks brings us to the next thing .data recovery... our customer said well ther are lot of pictures on the hard drive that my husband wold like to get back! * Perhaps another topic for another blog entry *