Toshiba A200-17O black screen. LA-3481 (BIOS or reflow ?)
Good day folks. I hope I'm not breaking any rules by not posting in the BIOS section, since this is also a generic discussion alongside a BIOS request. A friend asked me to have a look at this laptop which no longer turns on: it's a Toshiba A200-17O, probably some german model as far as I can tell since it points me to the german support site of Toshiba. See the picture of the label for the exact model. It powers up fine, and by that I mean all the power rails seem to come on, except there's no image on screen - classic failed graphics chip I though. The motherboard is a LA-3481P and it's got a pretty complicated setup: you got your CPU, a separate LE82PM965 graphics chip, an Intel NH82801HBM northbridge and a dedicated graphics card add-on, a LS-3481. I removed this last card and hit the Radeon GPU that's on it with some hot air (though without any flux) using my newly acquired soldering station hoping that would at least get it going enough to tell me that the graphics chip is indeed what failed - usually this works on most laptops. Now I'm not sure if I didn't use enough heat (not being thoroughly familiar with this new station) or the chip itself is dead or this is simply not the problem, because it didn't change anything...I tried the same procedure with the main board and the other 2 chips, but the same thing happened: black screen. If anything, now the laptop was shutting down after a few seconds since it was overheated. Another thing I noticed is that the NH82801 chip which I assume is the northbridge had some signs of flux around it, so perhaps someone reballed or reflown it before...not sure...
Should I persevere with the graphics card and some flux or should I attempt a BIOS flash ? I have a programmer and I THINK I managed to locate the 24c16W1 IC which is the EEPROM, but I would require a BIOS for THIS model, as I couldn't find one exactly and I'm not sure how cross-compatible they are. I found some for LA-3841p boards in general, but not the exact model. Any ideas are welcome, like some people might recognize the board and the issue and point me in the right direction. No NEC-TOKIN on this board as I was expecting, unfortunately. Thank you.
Should I persevere with the graphics card and some flux or should I attempt a BIOS flash ? I have a programmer and I THINK I managed to locate the 24c16W1 IC which is the EEPROM, but I would require a BIOS for THIS model, as I couldn't find one exactly and I'm not sure how cross-compatible they are. I found some for LA-3841p boards in general, but not the exact model. Any ideas are welcome, like some people might recognize the board and the issue and point me in the right direction. No NEC-TOKIN on this board as I was expecting, unfortunately. Thank you.
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