HP laptop, "General system board failure", what next?

I have an HP Pavilion DM1-3101ea laptop with an integrated AMD E-350 APU. Basically the same as DM1Z, if it is of any help. I have Ubuntu 12.04 on it. The problem appeared as follows: i tried to send it to sleep mode but it didn't work. After a short period of time the fan started spinning up. At this point i turned it off by holding the power button.

I came back to it after a while and, after i turned it on, I was brought to the following state: the fan and HDD spin up, completely blank screen, as in no power goes up to it, not even the LED backlight. The Caps Lock LED flashes 5 times, and the HP blink codes page states that this is "General system board failure". To be noted that they have different codes for CPU, GPU and BIOS failure.

What I have tried:

  • resetting the BIOS by disconnecting the BIOS battery and holding the power button for 30 seconds

  • booting it up with no HDD, WiFi card

  • booting it up with an Ubuntu Live USB stick and external VGA monitor + same & disconnected LVDS cable

  • booting it up with disconnected LVDS cable, no Live USB, no HDD and no WiFi

  • swapping around the RAM modules and slots

What I got was the same blink code.

Any ideas as to what might help?

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2 Answers

The only thing you haven't tried is maybe trying a different A/C adapter. I doubt it would make any difference. I'd say you've eliminated everything except the system board.

Replace the system board.

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Remove everything that you can including HDD and anything in a socket (e.g. wifi cards, modems). Then start testing whether the system boots to bios. Put back the components one by one and test booting.

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