Asus Laptop E410MA won't turn on

[Gabriel Knight]

Hi all! I have a laptop Asus E410MA of a friend that is puzzling me. When hitting the power button, nothing happens; plugging it in lights up the orange LED, indicating that it's working through AC power and the battery is less than 5% (regardless of how long it remains connected, it never changes). At least according to the manual. Now, I tried it with the battery disconnected, the same light appears, and the notebook still won't turn on. I tried with only the motherboard and the keyboard connected, just in case something was screwing the rest, and still nothing.

If I hold the power button for 30 seconds, as I read somewhere else, two things happen: first, the keyboard light turns on for a second, then the orange LEG turns off. Afterward, it turns on again, then it remains off until I let go of the button. This indicates that at least the power button works, but there's no change overall. The power button is in the keyboard, mind you.

Is the motherboard broken? I tried it with a universal charger and the same thing happened. Is there any way to "force" it to power up? I noticed that it doesn't have a BIOS battery so I can't factory reset it that way. I didn't notice any type of obvious damage to the motherboard.

Thanks all for the suggestions!

[mon2]

From the symptoms, the battery is not charging. This may be due to the age of the battery or could be due to a faulty DCin power path from the external power adapter to the main logic board. This is a common fault. Review the sticky above on charger circuits by piernov.

Would you have test equipment? Flux; tweezers; multimeter; soldering iron tools? If not, need at least a multimeter and then work with a local but qualified cellphone repair shop. You can then guide them on what to replace after the review with the multimeter.

Often, the fault is in the 1st or 2nd DCin mosfet which are $1 USD on Aliexpress or similar. The schematics for your unit are most likely not available because of the Asus brandname.