Fried Laptop - what died?

[chillidix]

I have an old laptop that died on me mysteriously. My guess is that it was an overheating issue and something got fried. I'm trying to figure out where the problem is. When the poer cable is plugged in, the light comes on. When I power on, more lights come on and the fans start running, but nothing comes up on the screen.

I tried hooking up to an external monitor. Nothing comes up. I tried removing the RAM, hard drive, cd drive, etc. Nothing changed, except I get a complicated POST beep after I removed some hardware. The beep goes away when I have everything installed again.

When I remove the graphics cards (this laptop has 2), the screen turns white when I boot up, but nothing else happens.

So, how do I narrow down what's broken? I'm guessing that it's either the mobo or cpu? I don't think it's a graphics card issue, because the computer should boot when they're not installed, right? Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[webworkings]

Have you checked the motherboard?

 

[harrysmellington]

Ok so here is a list of things that are possibly wrong and ways you can diagnose/fix them.

1) screen is broken: start the laptop, does the screen go from a complete black to a lighter black? this would determine if the screen is powering

2) motherboard is not putting out video: You've already established this so this could be the problem (although some settings may interfere with hdmi out).

3)BIOS is corrupt: Open up the laptop (find a guide online if you can, a similar laptop from the same brand will have similar way to open) and remove the CMOS battery, this is a button battery, if you can replace it with other otherwise place it back in it's holder. now try and start the laptop

If you can't start after doing 3) get it to a laptop repair or get a new one, you should also try the HDD in another computer and see if you can get the data off it

 

[helpstar]

did you try without battery and just power cable plugged in?

which laptop model is it?