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General discussion

Corrupted BIOS. Now what?

by Disneyfan Jun 22, 2009 9:55PM PDT

My Toshiba laptop has been having strange, intermittent problems for a while. Yesterday I went to the Toshiba support site and saw that there had been a few newer versions of the BIOS for my system and some of the fixes looked like they pertained to my problems. So I downloaded and installed the latest BIOS. Since then I can't power up my system. The power light comes on and I hear the fan spinning but nothing happens.

I called Toshiba and after letting me know that the system was out of warranty, they had me pull the battery and power cord, hold the power button in for 10 seconds, then put all power back and power on. This didn't make any difference. Now they fall back on the "sorry, out of warranty" statement.

Is there anything that I can do or is this system a goner? If I brought it to a service center as Toshiba suggests, what would they do? I'd appreciate any feedback on this.

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Today, most of the time...

by r. proffitt Former Forum moderator Jun 22, 2009 10:04PM PDT

They will swap the motherboard. Almost no service center today can, will swap the BIOS chip. In fact most are soldered down so that's a motherboard swap. The days of a shop having a BIOS chip programmer has passed.

If there is one hope it's the CMOS battery. I will not write the other twenty names it is called by or tell how to measure it with a Volt meter. It is cheap and an item often forgotten.
Bob

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