Acer travelmate P215-52G Refusing to power on sometimes

Eggwafflez

Has anyone have an issue with this? I'm absolutely annoyed by the fact that it works 50% of the time. I have tried removing the battery and pressing the power button to no avail. Could this be hardware failure? The CLK pin of the bios doesnt also have a signal sometimes and also the CPU and GPU power rails dont have voltages sometimes its like the system is refusing to power on.

Eggwafflez

No shorts to ground just that the main call to wake up the system isn't working as it should. Is this the responsibility of the BIOS? Could this also be a bios issue?

billsey

On your TravelMate P215-52G the power button is an integral part of the keyboard, with the wiring part of the keyboard ribbon cable. In order to power on the motherboard you need to get a good contact between the two wires on that cable that feed from the power button. I'm not positive, but I assume the physical connection uses the keyboard membranes just as the rest of the keys do. So, anything that gets in to contaminate the spaces between the membranes could cause symptoms like yours, just like they could cause intermittent key strokes. You could also get the symptoms if there's something wrong with the wiring in the cable itself, but that usually just means it doesn't work, not intermittent. It could also be something on the connection of that cable to the motherboard, corrosion would typically present as intermittent until it gets bad enough to just fail. Here's a diagram showing where the keyboard cable connects to the motherboard.

Peel the tape holding it in place and inspect the cable for any damage. Re-seat the connector a few times to wipe any corrosion off. I don't have access to a pinout of that cable so I can't suggest any good way to test the function of the power button itself... As with most modern laptops, in order to keep them thin, the keyboard is integrated into the top case so just replacing the keyboard isn't a cost effective solution.

Eggwafflez

I have cleaned every contacts on all of the connectors, the power button is doing as it should the problem is that 3.3v, 12V ,1V, 5V are all OK but clock signals aren't being generated sometimes. The clock IC is okay after desoldering it and testing it on a small test circuit. And also I have extracted the BIOS dump from an SPI programmer, there are garbage all over the place. I need a BIN file of the bios of this laptop and inject it directly to the SPI

Eggwafflez

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1177303#Comment_1177303

I have cleaned every contacts on all of the connectors, the power button is doing as it should the problem is that 3.3v, 12V ,1V, 5V are all OK but clock signals aren't being generated sometimes. The clock IC is okay after desoldering it and testing it on a small test circuit. And also I have extracted the BIOS dump from an SPI programmer, there are garbage all over the place. I need a BIN file of the bios of this laptop and inject it directly to the SPI

billsey

It's very unlikely the BIOS has anything to do with your issue. The BIOS code doesn't start to be accessed until after the power circuit turns things on, and that seems to be where your issue lies. IIRC the process starts with the momentary contact that connects PS_On to Gnd, which starts the initialization of the various power circuits, then the memory is initialized, then the CPU is initialized, then the CPU is told to jump to the BIOS code start, which does a memory check, copies the BIOS code to memory once it's known to be working and starts running the POST procedures.