BleepingComputer.com: Laptop Down

Ok, my girlfriend is at my house all of the time and she would get bored of just watchin me on my computer so she brought over her laptop one day.... an eMachine. Yea i know try not to laugh. Anyway, she took horible care of her computer, she would plug it in and un plug it with the power on to were you would see a spark, she would toss it around, and needless to say the crapy machine finally died. One day we went to turn it on and nothing happened, it was like there was no power going to the thing. I took a brief look at it, pretty much just glanced on the outside, and i could see no major sign of trama to the power suply or the power input on the machine. The only thing i can think of is a short somewere, but i cant tell if its in the power suply, on the motherboard of the laptop or if its a crappy batery. Does anyone know of a way that i can tell if it is a bad part, without buying a new part and testing it out?

If no one can think of a way to save the laptop than its no big deal, for i told her that eMachine sucked anyway and we got her a new laptop. But now we cant transfer the data from the old one to the new one because i cant start up the old one, does anyone have a solution to this?

Do you have a desktop you could put both hard-drives in?

Whatever you do, don't let her touch yours
Mark

I do have a desktop, and forgive me for i am not to familiar with the hardware of a laptop, but from what i heard it is almost impossible to get a laptop back together once you open it.

Actually removing the hard drive is not that difficult. Should just be a couple of screws. What is the model of the laptop. To hook up the laptop HD to your desktop you will need this . adapter
Mark

This post has been edited by garmanma: 18 May 2007 - 07:23 PM

First, check the AC adapter to make sure it's sending power through the cord. The volts and amps should be marked on the adapter so you'll know what you're looking for. You'll need a multimeter to test it - or a couple of pieces of wire with a 12 volt car light bulb as a field-expedient current tester.

Once that's done, examine the place where it plugs into the laptop - is it loose? Does the charging light come on when you wiggle it?

Those are the two most common things that cause a laptop to not power up - it's generally because there's no juice in the battery and none coming into the laptop from the AC adapter.

I did try using a Multimeter, it was one of the first things i did, but maybe i did not use it right. I tried testing both the positive and negative on the AC adapter itself and got no reading. I than tried just using the positive while putting the negative on a large metal object to use as a grounder, and still nothing. As far as wiggling the cord, that also has turned up no results.

Beastclaw, on May 18 2007, 06:29 PM, said:

I looked at the cable, and if im not mistaken, it looks like an adapter for the power of the HD, is the other conection just a basic IDE or SATA cable?

If the adapter isn't putting out power, then you're stuck there until you can replace/repair it. Once it puts out power, then you can test the rest of the system for power issues inside the case.