Toshiba Boots without ram???

[AdvancedTech]

Hello all...This is something I have never seen...maybe someone can shed some light on it.

A customer brings me a Toshiba Satellite P870 laptop that will not boot. The customer tells me that the system will eventually start if he leaves it for 4 or more hours.

I start it up and it boots ok. I check for viruses using Avast which I installed at the last service no detections. I run Malwarebytes it finds 3 instances of malware and I quarantined these.

I shutdown and re boot...no problems. I noticed there was a problem with the wireless driver. I resolved this rebooted and all was well.

After a few reboots...the system just stalls on reboot at a black screen. It doesn't appear that there is any sign of life at all (screen does not light up at all). I could not get it to boot to safe mode either.

I ran some diagnostics on the hard drive ( Gsmart...Western Digital Diagnostics..Crystal Disk Info....etc...and it passes all tests. I know that this is not the end all for hard drives but I felt that it gave me at least a baseline.

I tried booting to a Linux Live CD....no joy with this either.

I then decided to try to remove..clean and reseat the memory to see if that would help. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there were no modules in the system!!

My question is how did the machine boot at all without memory? I actually got it to boot about 7 times before I encountered the same issue as the customer.

Has anybody seen this before?

Many thanks for your help!!

 

[mraikes]

That one might have four slots. The two empty you can see easily and a couple more buried in the depths.

EDIT: A quick Google suggests the other slots might be under the keyboard.

 

[AlexanderCS]

It's likely that particular model has internal memory slots. What you're looking at is just the "easy access" slots if you wanted to expand.

Have you run a memtest yet? What does it say about the amount of memory?

Edit: Sniped!

 

[MichaelBits]

Did you check how much ram was there when windows was up? Or see what the bios says?

Are you sure it doesn't have slots on the other side of the board? Like under the keyboard.

 

[glricht]

As others have said, the base memory is probably under the keyboard.

As to non-booting, this might be a heat-related issue - works when it's cold, but fails after it gets hot (some heat issues show themselves as the opposite). Try leaving the PC off for an extended amount time -- a few hours to over night -- and try again. If it boots, but later fails again, probable MB issue.

 

[AdvancedTech]

Thanks to all for a quick reply... I forgot to mention that the machine was running Win 7 home premium 64 bit!! Sorry about that.

I have not run mem test yet and I did not notice how much ram was installed when Windows was running.

I'll check for additional ram slots.

Thanks again for such quick and informative responses!!!

 

[NYJimbo]

I've been seeing some Acer laptops (not netbooks) with the first 4gb of ram soldered to the motherboard. Two more slots are available but were empty when I worked on them. I think I posted something about this before.

 

[katz]

I've been seeing some Acer laptops (not netbooks) with the first 4gb of ram soldered to the motherboard. Two more slots are available but were empty when I worked on them. I think I posted something about this before.

That is so wrong...

 

[NYJimbo]

That is so wrong...

At first I thought it was video ram, but when I realized no ram was installed in the slots I was thinking "Why would you do something like this ?".

If I have time I will go back and see if I have a photo of it and post it here.