laptop now completes post. root cause was a corrupt bios. next step is to assemble the pile of parts back into a laptop.

thanks.

good morning,
i have dell e6540's and not e5440's so your mileage may vary. on the e6540 you can interrupt the boot process by pressing the f12 key after the power key and you will see an option on the resulting menu to run a pre-boot system assessment. it is a comprehensive hardware diagnostic. another option in the e6540 is to hold the "fn" key when powering on which runs hardware tests and produces a combination of led lights that identify possible hardware issues. the led combinations are defined in a table in the users manual. i didn't see the table of codes in the e5440...

good morning mcplslg123 and thank you for the feedback,

based on the mobo's brd file there are 21 coils (elements starting with "pl") on the mobo and unfortunately i lack an lcr to measure inductance. however, i will measure each with my dmm and convert to henrys and report back my findings. it would be a rough estimate of inductance but do you think that would be a close enough measure for diagnostic purposes? or should i bite the bullet and buy an lcr? if so any recommendation that fit in a modest budget?

my going-in premise was that the issue i am seeing...

good morning all,

i purchased a used dell e6540 laptop used 10 months ago from a vendor on ebay. intel i-7 processor, 16 gb ddr3 memory, 256 gb ssd., mobo la-9413p (rev 1.0 dated 2014-08-04). i've inflicted no damage on it since purchase but its past is unknown. starting 2 weeks ago it began to fail to boot (initially 9 of 10 boot attempts failed, now 10 of 10 fail). there was no new hardware or software added (i was using as a kodi video server). the post process doesn't complete and booting no longer displays the dell logo screen - screen remains black with no backlight. some other...

greetings all, i thought this might be a good place to ask about hardware-oriented troubleshooting steps to perform on a failed laptop i have. i've been reading posts here for several weeks and have learned some solid troubleshooting techniques already, such as leveraging brd files and schematic files for a more structured troubleshooting process. one poster gave two screenshots of configuration settings that cleaned up a lot of unnecessary symbols and made the allegro free viewer actually useful. that alone saved several hours of research in terms of which config bits to set....