Laptop will not boot up unless I remove and reinsert the battery

February 17, 2010 8:45 PM

My laptop will not boot up after being powered on. How can I fix this?

After trying to boot up the laptop from sleep mode or hibernation, or after turning off, or when restarting from the "Start" menu, our Windows XP home Acer laptop will not boot up.

Pushing the power button makes the power button light up. The hard drive briefly engages (the little light flashes) and then stops.

The only way to resolve this is by disconnecting the power supply, removing the battery, reinserting the battery, reconnecting the power supply (this step is optional), and then holding down the power button to turn on the machine (it does not boot up), then holding the power button down to force off, then pushing the power button to start up again.

A disk check does nothing.

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

For the time being I'm just leaving the machine on, and setting the monitor to sleep after 5 minutes of no use.

Thanks!

posted by KokuRyu to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Does it behave this way if the computer is turned on while the battery is not connected at all?
posted by majick at 8:48 PM on February 17, 2010

Not sure... My wife is using it at the moment so I can't experiment.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:56 PM on February 17, 2010

Did this just start happening after a recent Windows update? Our laptop is having a similar, frustrating issue. So far, I can't figure it out either (and I'm really not sure if it has anything to do with the update).
posted by theotheramy at 9:11 PM on February 17, 2010

I think majick has a good question there. My old laptop had booting issues similar to that (I don't think identical, but it was a while ago, and my memory is hazy), and on the advice of a friend I tried running it on wall power with no battery. The booting problems disappeared. My friend told me my battery was on its last legs. So I ordered a new battery, swapped it in, and the laptop was back to normal. I can't say for sure whether the same thing is happening to you, but seeing if it boots normally with the battery disconnected should help narrow things down at least.
posted by sigmagalator at 10:36 PM on February 17, 2010

This fix did not work.
posted by KokuRyu at 5:49 PM on February 18, 2010

Nobody has suggested a "fix" yet. I asked a question to help narrow down the source of the problem. We can now reasonably assume the battery logic is not at fault. In laptops with trouble turning on, it sometimes is. Just not in your case.

Have you checked with Acer to see if there is a BIOS update? This bug may be addressed in a more recent version of the BIOS. Or alternately, did you apply a BIOS update prior to the problem appearing?

"Did this just start happening after a recent Windows update?"

The inability to POST is not related to a Windows update, since Windows is not even loaded at the time of failure. Unless KokuRyu described the problem inaccurately -- there's no reason to believe that's the case yet -- it's not completing POST and bootstrap. Windows is still out of the picture at that point in the boot sequence.
posted by majick at 5:25 AM on February 19, 2010

Thanks majick

I will take a look and see if there has been some sort of BIOS update
posted by KokuRyu at 9:47 AM on February 20, 2010