Member Avatar for Satarel

Hello everyone

I need to pick some brains,

I have a Toshiba Satellite 2400-103 laptop which I purchased approx 3 years ago.

Everything with the laptop has been fine until last week.

I was using my laptop in my office, packed it away and took it home.

When I started the laptop at home, initially everything was fine until I recieved a blue screen, unfortunately the screen was shown for a second (so was unable to read it) then the laptop switched off.

I managed to reboot the laptop and put it into safe mode, incase of a virus etc. and decided to run a virus check, within seconds of the virus check starting the laptop had switched itself off.

Now I am unable to start it at all.:eek:

The power mains light is present and so is the battery light,
the power on light also appears when switched on.
The drive lights for A and CD ROM flick once when the laptop is started, then nothing.
The hard drive light stays unlit.

I have tried rebooting using a rescue disk floppy and the original windows CD but the drives apear dead other than the drives light flicks once on start up.

So there appears to be power but not a lot else.

Can you suggest anything that I can try to get the laptop back and working?.

Many Thanks

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by lxq_ikrana

Dani AI

Generated

Quick summary and a systematic checklist to work through before buying parts.

The behavior described by and repeated by — a blue‑screen then sudden shutdown, now only power LEDs with the drive lights twitching once and no display — is commonly caused by a failed hard drive but can also be caused by bad RAM, a failing power rail/DC jack, or a motherboard/BIOS failure. Work through these steps in order; each step isolates the likely faulty subsystem.

  • Remove all power (AC + main battery) and hold the power button 20–30 seconds to discharge. Reconnect AC only and try to boot.
  • Remove any external media (CD, floppy, USB, PCMCIA). Old Sat.2400s may not USB‑boot, so try the Windows CD or rescue floppy if available.
  • Swap power: if possible try a known good compatible adapter, or boot with battery only. An adapter that looks OK can still fail under load.
  • Reseat memory: with power removed, open the RAM hatch, remove modules, clean contacts, then try one module in one slot at a time. Faulty RAM often gives no POST/display.
  • Remove the hard disk and try to boot to CD/floppy. If the machine POSTS or gets further without the drive, the HDD is almost certainly the culprit.
  • Check the HDD physically: listen/feel for spin. If it spins but is not recognized, connect it to a desktop with an IDE/PATA‑to‑USB adapter or enclosure to test and copy data. If it does not spin, professional data recovery is the only reliable option.
  • Reset BIOS/CMOS if you can (disconnect power and try to remove the small RTC battery briefly), but only if comfortable doing so.

If none of the above produces POST or any video output then the fault is likely on the motherboard/graphics or a power subsystem (DC jack/regulator). That usually means board repair or replacement; on a laptop this can cost as much as a replacement machine. Agreeing with , the HDD is a plausible first suspect — but run the isolation steps above first so any replacement or recovery effort is targeted and economical.

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Member Avatar for raybay

Defective hard drive. Replace. I recommend the Seagate Momentus or the Western Digital Scorpio. Lots of places, such as , www.directron.com, www.newegg.com, www.tigerdirect.com have them. The seagates have a five year warranty.
You can buy an adapter for $5.00 at that will allow you to possibly save the data to a destop hard drive. There are other transfer tools that might work, but they cost $80 bucks.
You got good life out of that drive. It is proabably a Toshiba hard drive, one of the best, but nothing lasts forever except for a bad marriage.

Member Avatar for lxq_ikrana

Sorry to bring up this ancient thread, but I've got a similar problem.

Two green leds light up when the laptop is charging. When I try to turn it on (without the charger) only one LED turns on.

There is no response from the LCD screen. I've tried an external monitor as well. There's nothing there either, which *probably* means there's nothing wrong with the laptop LCD screen. The DVD drive light flashes for just a second. The HDD light stays off. There is no customary beep from the system while booting up (Do laptops also beep?).

As you have probably guessed, this isn't my laptop, I'm rather new to the whole laptop thing. My brother's moved on to a newer laptop and I can use this if I can get it working :P

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

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