e6400 boot problem after repair

Hi,

The power socket on my e6400 was damaged after a fall. The laptop still worked, but the pins were damaged in the power connector. I had been using it still with a charger, but in fear of causing further damage to the charger - I bought a replacement DC jack + cable from ebay and followed this video to replace it:

Dell Latitude E6400 | DC Jack with Cable Replacement | How-To-Tutorial - YouTube

Everything seemed to go ok. I followed it through slowly and eventually got everything back together again.

Sadly, when switching on the machine, the fans made a noise for a moment and then just the caps indicator above the keyboard flashed.

Looking at some other threads and the dell site, the flashing of caps lock indicator signifies a memory error.

I tried reseating the ram. I tried both slots. I tried a piece of working ram from another e6400 I have. No change.

I then refollowed the whole video, removing everything that I removed the first time and reseating it with extra care.

Is there anything else I can try? Anything that is a common cause of a problem.

Could it be that the motherboard is damaged somehow and reporting the ram as missing/errored?

Wondering if I can troubleshoot this further, or whether it is cheaper to cut my losses and buy another machine.

Many thanks for any help!

 

Well you done a few good steps already

It does look like a motherboard issue,

You can try the minimum boot config, remove drives, CD ROM Wirelss card etc and just boot with a single ram chip.

you can try reseating the CPU as well.

What mst people may not realize with the motherboard is it a multi layered design, and soldering a multilayer board is not as simple as you would think, and using a regular soldering iron can indroduce ESD damage.

 

Ok thanks, I will try a minimum boot and see if that works.

I didn't do any soldering. The part I bought was the DC jack already soldered into the cable - so I just swapped out the whole thing.

Is the motherboard likely to have been damaged just in the process of the dismantle procedure. I guess I could have introduced a crack somehow as I was screwing/unscrewing things.

 

Did you follow anti static precautions? My guess is the fall damaged other parts, whose failure was exacerbated by being removed and re-assembled. Count the flashes, major failures such as memory cause a known number of flashes that can give you further clues....