yoahyo

Sorry, long post ahead. TL:DR at the bottom. I have been trying to convert my old laptop into a home server with NAS. Few days ago all is well and I went to buy a 4TB WD red to serve as the NAS drive. I came back and plugged in my drive and booted up the Ubuntu and configured the server. All good there. I shut down and restarted the laptop to change the default boot order to my USB stick with Ubuntu, and changed this additional setting called something like “beep on POST”. I saved changes and restarted. I went to do stuff on my main computer and tried to login to my server through SSH and realised that it wasn’t online, so I went back to the laptop to see a black screen, but with motherboard lights on. I forced a shutdown by Long pressing the power button and tried to boot from it. All that happens is that the lights come on(and stay on, not flashing), fans spin, no beep codes and no display. Troubleshooting done: Clearing CMOS I removed the CMOS battery, removed laptop battery disconnected power supply, and put the CMOS battery back and tried again, no luck. Tried booting without CMOS battery, same issue. After I tried various variations of “clearing residual charges” by removing all power sources including CMOS battery and holding the power button, I took them all out and left it overnight. Next day tried again, but still not solved. Connecting to external display I connected my external display to the motherboard using BOTH VGA AND HDMI to try to get some video signal, no luck. Swapping RAM: I tried to boot using 1 RAM stick, and swapped with the other one. As i don't have a spare DDR3 RAM stick lying around, I used a DDR3L stick, same thing. I removed all RAM sticks and connected the laptop speakers and an external audio jack, but no beep codes were heard. Removing everything: I removed every possible connector(including RAM,wifi card,etc) from the motherboard except the CPU and heat pipe fan and tried again, same lights come on, fans spin and the cpu and gpu heats up. No beep codes heard with internal speaker connected too. Reseat CPU: I reseated the CPU and tried again, same outcome. Next, I used a multimeter and tested for voltages, there is 19v coming into the motherboard, I swapped power supplies too, no improvement. Plugged a USB light into the USB port and it lights up. So it seems that the 5v rail is alright. I turned off the motherboard and disconnected the internal LVDS display cable. I turned on the motherboard, and plugged the LVDS cable in. The LCD flashes full white once. I was able to hold the connector in a position that the white screen was solid. So it looks like there is power to the display, just a signal issue. I also tried to load the newest BIOS file onto a flash drive and hopefully it will flash the BIOS. When I powered the motherboard, the flash drive activity flashes once or twice, then turns off. Nothing happens. One abnormal thing I noticed is that the laptop has an indicator for caps lock. Sometimes when I power the laptop, it lights up and stays solid, sometimes it doesn’t even light up. Does anyone have any ideas on what could have happened? I am stuck on this for the whole period and have no idea what could have caused it. I am planning to buy a CH341a BIOS chip programmer to manually flash the BIOS chip but it looks unlikely that a BIOS could corrupt itself. Any suggestions? TLDR: Changed some BIOS settings,now does not boot nor POST. Fan turns on, CPU and GPU heats up. Tried to reset CMOS and waited overnight. Tried breadboarding but nothing works. Motherboard lights turn on and stays solid. Screen black. System info: Motherboard: ASUS K43SD mainboard CPU:i5-2450M RAM:2x 4GB DDR3 1333MHz GPU: GT 610M If you require more info, please feel free to ask for them. I will gladly provide them. Thanks everyone.