Where from?!?

At work they all get ordered through the company with the hardware repair contract, but I've had one come in for repair at home and the motherboard is completely kaput.

I've been on ebay in the hope I'll pick one up cheap, but they're going for too much...

Any ideas?? Google hasn't been very helpful. they can offer me companies to send the laptop off to but I only want the part....

Search by the part number and something should turn up. Alternatively get on the blower to your laptop's manufacturer as the surest way of getting the right part, admittedly an expensive way.

How do you know your MoBo bought it?

HDD tests fine, ram tests fine, laptop won't even bring Bios splash screen but presents power and HDD lights, plus the fan kicks in and the DVD drive attempts to spin up. Screen is black with no display at all.

Seen this a couple of times, and each time it's been motherboard failure.

I've searched by part number (A000009030) and there's a couple in the USA, but obviously the shipping is absurd on that. Don't fancy contacting Toshiba for the part, when the laptop fully working is only worth around £150!

Edited 13 October, 201213 yr by djswivel

Does it beep at all in any fashion? I.e. normally it is one beep followed by BIOS splash screen. If MoBo has problems then it will let you know by beeping. If it is completely dead than their is no power to anything. To me it looks like either screen failure or graphics failure. Former easy to rectify the latter - take it apart, sell for parts and you will have a good start for a new machine . As you mentioned, getting a second hand MoBo is rather difficult and buying new doesn't make sense financially.

I wouldn't even bother attempting to fix it, the hassle of getting parts for an obsolete laptop are a nightmare as you are finding out. The problem of getting parts for current ones is bad enough.

No beeps, just black screen. Laptop did fire up initially, but after being wiped and the OS reinstalled is decided not to boot after the 2nd round of updates.

I might stick it on the evil online auction site for parts, but I think I'll hold on to it for a min to see if another comes up cheap I can scavenge parts from....

Cheers for the advice though, I just thought it would be as easy to get hold of a laptop mobo as it is a desktop one!

Lesson learnt now!

Most of these things are made in Taiwan, so it might be worth looking on AliBaba or AliExpress; is it a no-name or branded model??

The problem you'll find is as has been said its not worth your trouble, laptop motherboards are pretty much totally non standard and are made to only fit the laptop they originally came with. Spares tend to be mega expensive, very doubtful you'll find any kind of a non OEM motherboard for it.

I wasnt thinking of that, many of the parts makers sell directly, as well as through official channels; for many products there are hundreds of companies selling it, or a clone of varying quality.

There was an outfit I used once in/around warrington, but the cost wasn't cheap. I only did it because a comparable replacement laptop was out of reach to me at the time.

I had the mobo die on my Apple a few months ago - replacement board was just shy of £800. It was 30 days outside of the cover given over the Nvidia gfx debacle. Thankfully, Apple covered it, otherwise I would have been in trouble.

Lets face it, unless it's something specific you need that machine for, it's easy enough to pick up a serviceable windows-based laptop for relatively little and certainly less than it would cost for genuine internals.

Have you tried booting it with an external monitor connected?

Yep, tried external monitor and still nothing. It's been added to my laptop graveyard that I may someday go through for parts...

Unless you can find a donor then you'd probably be better off stripping it for spares and gettng a new one. I picked up an i5 from Dell outlet for £280 so £150 is a lot of a part on an old one. Plus it'd be a total pig to put in.

Exactly, one with busted screen, keyboard etc...

Excuse the thread revival, but I work here: -

www.lappyparts.co.uk - www.flattvparts.co.uk - There's not a lot that we've not had spares for, and laptops parts are dirt cheap so repairs and upgrades are reasonably priced too...

Not the signs of motherboard failure. If the fans and hard disk are spinning up then the motherboard has likely completed its POST checks safely. Sounds more like GPU failure, sadly this is soldered to the motherboard or on 2nd gen Intel core lines or AMD fusion lines its within the CPU itself. Its beyond the scope of a bios check too.

Alternate might be OS corruption but I would have thought you would get something on screen.