Question Laptop keeps restarting seconds after powering on, advice please?

[drakeducaine]

I have a Lenovo N22 model 80S6 (circa 2016, not a Chromebook). It's chugged along fine all these years, until I recently had Windows 10 do an update and then shut down. Now when I power it on, it starts up for just a few seconds, screen activating but staying blank, then restarting, over and over. I can hear a click when it powers on. Can't get to a BIOS screen or the recovery partition.

I've attempted to test the battery and charger by unplugging, holding the power button to dump any static, then hooking back up and powering on again. Restart loop is the same regardless of whether I'm using the battery, or charger, or both. Battery had nearly a full charge at the start of this issue.

I've also left the CMOS battery unplugged, plugged it back in to do a CMOS reset. Upon powering on, the black screen showed the text "System is re-configuring, it will restart soon please wait..." before the restart loop took over again as it had before. The same thing happens when I leave the CMOS battery unplugged and power on. The battery is encapsulated and I don't have a replacement part on hand.

RAM is soldered on so I can't reseat to test that.

I'm a novice at best when it comes to repairs but at least I have the hardware maintenance manual to help with the breakdown. Suggestions for what I should try next? Replace the CMOS battery? Dead motherboard? I'd love to keep this one working long enough to buy me some time to find a new one. Any help much appreciated!

 

[AlHuneke]

I don't know the hot key for Lenovo, but there should be a keyboard key (such as Del, F2 or something else you can press on power up to enter the BIOS. Is that how you were trying to enter the BIOS or were you thinking it had to be down from Windows? If you can't get to the BIOS, there is not much else you can do. If you can get into the BIOS, you can see if the system drive shows up. Is it an HDD or SSD? Once you can get to the BIOS, you can boot a diagnostic program from a USB drive and perhaps learn something. Let us know how this goes and we'll go from there.

If you can't get to the BIOS, you likely have a HW failure. Different manufacturers have different ways of doing things, but not seeing a Lenovo logo on startup seems pretty bad to me.

 

[drakeducaine]

I don't know the hot key for Lenovo, but there should be a keyboard key (such as Del, F2 or something else you can press on power up to enter the BIOS. Is that how you were trying to enter the BIOS or were you thinking it had to be down from Windows? If you can't get to the BIOS, there is not much else you can do. If you can get into the BIOS, you can see if the system drive shows up. Is it an HDD or SSD? Once you can get to the BIOS, you can boot a diagnostic program from a USB drive and perhaps learn something. Let us know how this goes and we'll go from there.

If you can't get to the BIOS, you likely have a HW failure. Different manufacturers have different ways of doing things, but not seeing a Lenovo logo on startup seems pretty bad to me.

Well, the fact that I was mistaken in what hotkey I needed to use might have been all that was wrong. I was trying a few combos but apparently the right one was just pressing F2 repeatedly. Got me successfully into the BIOS screen, where I reset to factory defaults and everything started up normally. Running it through some diagnostics revealed everything with the disc and the Windows image is OK. The update must just have knocked something really out of whack, hopefully it doesn't happen again.

I know this machine isn't exactly a powerhouse, but I didn't need to go laptop shopping right now. Phew! Thanks AlHuneke!