| I have a Sony VAIO PCG-FXA53 laptop which now often acts up by not booting up properly. When I press a power button, then the hard drive starts up, but that's it. I have to force shut down, repeat this several times, and by luck it then would boot up. Also when the computer is operating, there is random chance of this computer locks up by itself. I now changed the OS from windows XP to Linux Crunchbang ("Statler"). A number of years ago (maybe around 2004) I had Joe Kabalan (who is also in this forum) replace the CPU because the CPU died. It was AMD Athlon XP 1500+, now it is powered by AMD Athlon XP 1400+. For a long time after then, it worked fine. Question: what is the possible cause? How can I diagnose the problem? Maybe a loose connection somewhere or a part beginning to fail? I have opened up the laptop many times, but no luck in spotting any suspect of the cause. Will appreciate your help since this freeze/nonbooting problem is so random and unpredictable. Wirawan |
>>?Re: Sony VAIO PCG-FXA53 often refused to boot up, or locked up Wirawan Purwanto said: I have a Sony VAIO PCG-FXA53 laptop which now often acts up by not booting up properly. When I press a power button, then the hard drive starts up, but that's it. I have to force shut down, repeat this several times, and by luck it then would boot up.Also when the computer is operating, there is random chance of this computer locks up by itself. I now changed the OS from windows XP to Linux Crunchbang ("Statler"). A number of years ago (maybe around 2004) I had Joe Kabalan (who is also in this forum) replace the CPU because the CPU died. It was AMD Athlon XP 1500+, now it is powered by AMD Athlon XP 1400+. For a long time after then, it worked fine. Question: what is the possible cause? How can I diagnose the problem? Maybe a loose connection somewhere or a part beginning to fail? I have opened up the laptop many times, but no luck in spotting any suspect of the cause. Will appreciate your help since this freeze/nonbooting problem is so random and unpredictable. Wirawan I can only assume that you cleaned the CPU heat exchanger when you had the unit open. This would reduce the chance of it being a heat related problem. So, Basic troubleshooting would have you remove the hard drive and power on the unit to test for failure, but it is intermittent. I would wager a guess as the hard drive going bad. This can happen even with out the blue screen. I would suggest that it is a good time to backup everything you wish to save and try a different hard drive. You might also want to check for intermittent problems with the memory slots. Best of luck. Laptop Willie
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>>?Re: Sony VAIO PCG-FXA53 often refused to boot up, or locked up I don't think heat exchanger or hard drive is an issue. The fan and heatsink are all clean. As far as HDD, it is still functioning properly. No clicking or sound of "retrying" at all. Mind you the laptop would not boot from cold (i.e. after being turned off for a while).A few investigative questions: 1) could this be caused by a weak or dead CMOS battery? 2) any diagnostic tool to check if certain hardware begins to fail (e.g. motherboard, graphics card, whatever)? What I mean is a comprehensive tool to check each part, e.g. memory (like memtest86), then CPU, then this and that peripheral, ... I know I may be asking too much here. 3) the other thing I remember is this: when I was still actively using this laptop, once in a while I will hear a very high pitch "beeeeeep" followed by hard drive access like park-unpark or load-unload kind of action. Then everything went normal again. It's hard to pinpoint when this happened. It happened under Linux (various flavors). Recently I haven't encountered this, but again, I have not been using this laptop for a long time. 4) I heard of some mechanical problem with one of the memory (DIMM) slot in this or related Sony model. Could this be a problem too? Wirawan
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