Notebooks & Netbooks

[MrHappy]

So my old but formerly sturdy Aspire 9805 has been chugging alone fine until this morning.  The unit posted to bios then froze.  After checking everything out I eventually unseeded and reseeded the ram, cleared the cmos (unplugged the cmos battery and replugged it in) removed the battery and hard drives, etc and put it all back together.  I am now able to get into the bios and the Intel raid screens however if I try to boot into anything "graphical" it just locks up.  For example, no windows, no windows boot cd, not even acronis true image loader or Seagate's graphical seatools.  If I stick to the dos like screens (bios, Intel raid, etc) it's fine and display is fine.  I was even able to boot to Seagate's "text" diagnostics to see the drives are fine.  I've tried booting with and without the battery and hard drives and just about every other combo I could think of.  The system, when trying to display graphics other than "Dos" style just stops, forever.  I was thinking perhaps a bad onboard video chip except they usually don't continue to work fine in non-graphical modes.  Any ideas or suggestions are appreciated!!

[finlux]

Hi MrHappy

That's a tough one!

It COULD be the graphics chip, but usually when they die, you get no display -  text or otherwise! Have you tried booting a live Linux disk to see if that works?

You could pay a visit to your friendly local PC store, where they may be happy to swap out the graphics chip with an (hopefully) compatible one. But is it worth the expense on such an old laptop?

[MrHappy]

Yea, I agree about the graphics chip.  I actually work in IT and have been at it for some time now and have never seen this issue.  I've tried every boot disk I could think of, all are fine until actual graphics are to be displayed then the system stops... even the drive diagnostics cd is good in text mode but died in graphical mode...linux, windows boot, windows usb boot (different version), acronis imaging cd... all die when graphics are to come up on the screen.  (I can see the screen still has power and it backlit, just dead black and the system stops accessing anything).  If I sit in the bios or on a dos screen it's fine forever, no lock ups, nada.  Really weird issue that I'd love to find out the cause of not just to get the laptop working again but because it's so odd.

[finlux]

Good luck - and let us know if you manage to fix it!

[MrHappy · Accepted solution]

I think I've figured it out though it seems odd...

I tore the entire laptop down again last night removing literally everything that wasn't glued down (wireless, bluetooth, drives, ram, battery, you name it) then put a couple different sticks of ram back in (with everything else still removed) and booted up to a diagnostics CD with graphics to see if it would boot.  It did.  Progress.

Then, one device at a time I put back in the original hardware and tried booting to ensure that device was ok.  Eventually the original RAM was the culprit.  One of the 2 dimms tested with errors in memcheck so I've left it out and am running on the other original one with half the ram but everything boots up.  I've seen plenty of ram issues in my time but none that caused a system not to display graphics of any kind.  Usually they just blue screen or lock up.  Guessing the G73 nVidia chip was trying to use the system ram that was bad every time.  Like I said, weird, but at least it's working again.  Just wanted to post an update in case anyone else runs into this.

[finlux]

Great news MrHappy. I would not have thought about a RAM issue!