Ay up chucks! My wife's toshiba laptop (satellite M40 - 313 windows XP SP2 1 Gb RAM etc just over 1 year old) has suddenly died. She went to turn it on and all it does is beep pathetically, whirr a bit then it tries again 3 or 4 times before giving up. Some green leds come on but nothing on the screen at all. It doesn't even get to the Toshiba logo. It had really been fine up to this point and this has come as a bit of a mystery.

Help us out please and save our marriage!!!

Looks like dead hard drive.

How does it beep exactly? Beep codes are useful in these situations (ex. 1 long - 2 shorts is a beep-code for faulty video adapter).

Wow that was quick Chaky! Thanks for the quick reply... There has been some news since then...

We bought the thing one year and 17 days ago and when I told the guy the story he took it back for repair and will pretend I bought it back BEFORE the warranty ran out...

So, hopefully Toshiba will fix it at no charge. I'm a bit worried about the "dead Hard drive" diagnosis- This means total data loss, right?

I figured maybe the thing overheated somehow and fried the CPU or something...

We Shall see, thanks for helping anyway and I'll post the outcome if I ever get it back!

Slan abhaile agus adh mor ort!

Usually hard drives go with a "bang" (sudden and fatal), but there is a chance of data recovery. You said that there is spinning before it gives up. That means that CPU is still working. It's either (99%) HD or (1%) motherboard (IDE/SATA controller to be precise), but my money is on the drive. IDE/SATA controllers usually just stop seeing HD. Spinning means it sees the HD, but can't get any reading from it. Could just be a bad cable. Who's to know? Anyway, I hope HD is still recoverable. I've heard of some companies that specialized in data recovery from dead HD's.. they take out the disc and recover data directly from it.. but I don't really know who, where, what or how much.

My thosiba laptop gives a very long beep just displaying the thosiba logo only... i dont know wats worng with it... please some one tell me about this....
Thanks in advance

It could be as simple as a stuck key, but if not, then unplug everything external before switching on. Also make sure there are no cd's or floppies in drives.

If that does not work then I would remove power lead, battery, wait five minutes before putting battery back in and power lead and trying again.

Then switch off, remove memory and power up again.

One long beep sounds to me like something is stopping it booting.

Denis

Try hitting ESC key before the beep or, if possible, disable the full screen logo in BIOS. That way you'll se the POST error message(s), instead of logo design.

i am in the same ship, with beeping errors. if you can give me a web site or doc that has the beep layout i would be verry appreciative. i have a m35-s456 i recieved by trading a broken down old car. the beeping is, one space three space three space one. i love working on pcs but laptops are new to me and i dont like breaking things while taking them apart laptops are to tight toghther for my preferance.

Hey drex I found this website, I also have a dead machine (actually more than one) that I'm trying to fix, but I also am more wary of laptops.

And whilst on the subject of diagnosis, does anyone know of any motherboard diagnostic cards that they would happily recommend? Or are these not needed if you have a screwdriver set and a list of BIOS beep codes??

1-3-3-1 is a beepcode for "Autosize DRAM"

If it is Phoenix BIOS, anyway.

If that is the caae, then it is a RAM issue. Either incompatible, faulty or needs to be reseated. If there is more than one stick in it, try running with one at the time. You can't rule out faulty motherboard either.