So I have been using this laptop on and off, and just two days ago I went to use the firmware utility script to check if there was a firmware update, which indeed there was, I flashed it, rebooted and it worked fine. Come the next day, I open up the laptop, black screen, power buttons do nothing, ESC + Refresh + power does nothing, I left it on the charger for an entire day, and still nothing. I even unplugged the battery and plugged a charger in but still, nothing.
I’m very confused why this happened, as it was working fine previously, was able to boot into my OS, no errors in the log, there didn’t seem to be a problem when flashing, everything was successful.
I’m unsure if this is actually bricked or I just need to do something, and the worst part is I don’t have a programmer or anything to modify the BIOS. I do have a soldering iron, but I don’t have actual wire, and I am not great at soldering at all. But if you have any ideas please tell me.
No, power light does not come on, which is weird as when I was getting rid of the write protection via the battery it was dim due to not having enough voltage, so if it was a battery issue it would be very obvious if so.
And also, the screen backlight does not come on either, it’s pretty much acting as if it didn’t have a battery even if plugged in
I doubt as it was working fine with no issues, motherboard failures tend to give some form of warning before they just die and I didn’t see any of those period. No slow downs, no errors on startup log (In the arch Linux bootup) and I hadn’t had any form of crash or anything prior to the brick.
Yes, there are cases of motherboards just dying suddenly, but they are typically very very rare. There’s usually some form of symptom that just went unnoticed, but I had no such thing. Booting into my OS took the exact same length it’s always taken, and the responsiveness of the OS hadn’t slowed down after the update.
I’ll lay out the events in order,
I update the computer, reboot, computer boots up, screen turns on and I don’t see the coreboot logo for about 7-6 seconds, then it appears, boots as normal, I am sent into my OS’s boot menu, and select my OS as normal, and nothing seems out of the ordinary after the boot is finished. I then finish what I was doing, close the lid, and unplug the charger, and leave it alone for the night. Come the next morning, I plug the charger back in, open the lid, and it acts as if it has been shutdown entirely, but no matter what I press, it doesn’t turn on. I had not shutdown the laptop at all, and it was configured so that when the lid was shut, it would be put in sleep.
If it helps, I do have a multimeter, so if that could help with troubleshooting it, please tell me where to put the terminals.