Failed bios Amilo L6825 laptop

A friend recently gave me a Fugitsu Amilo L6825 laptop which was completely dead. He asked me to see if i could do a cheap repair or else he would buy a new one and scrap this non working laptop.

When i say dead the laptop had no indicator illumination of lights or disks spinning. My friend told me that he was on the Fujitsu support site and noted that his bios was not the current one as shown on their website. So for what ever reason he decided to update his bios on the laptop. When doing this update he encounted a problem where the laptop switched itself off during the update process. This resulted in the laptop now having a bad corrupt bios. The bios is the first part of software code to run when you switch on a computer. This code  gives instructions for the power on self test (post). This self test checks and ensures that the computer has all the required parts eg disks memory etc and that they function.

The laptop had been running Windows XP and had all his important info  on the hard disk eg emails photos etc. Normally i can recover a bad bios. Most modern computer bioses can be recovered by using a crisis disk whether this be via a floppy or usb disk media. On some computers however when the bios boot tables become corrupt this can be problematic as this normally requires the bios chip to be manually reprogrammed or replaced. My friend said that he had followed the instructions within the bios update utility but half way through the update the laptop switched its self off. As the laptop showed  no signs of life whats so ever i had to open the laptop casing up to get to the bios chip. For a change this laptop was quite easy to work on. The laptop bios was a plcc32 chip part number  A29040AL-70.

The laptop bios chip was also placed in a socket which meant it could easily be taken out. On some motherboards the bios chip can be soldered onto the motherboard which then requires the chip to be unsoldered for reprogramming or replacement. Bios eeprom programmers can be purchased with test clips that can be clipped to the chip but these are quite expensive to buy. For those who don't have an eeprom programmer the bios chips are quite cheap to buy of fleabay. The sellers can  also send the chips pre-programmed with the bios code of your choice. I however have an eeprom programmer which supports this particular chip. I have a usb pro GQ-4x supplied by a company called MCUmall Electronics in Canada.

I was able to use my eeprom programmer to re-program the bios code back on to his existing chip. On completing the bios recovery the laptop was fully recovered. My friend was amazed and very grateful for having his laptop bought back to life. The most important thing was he was able to get his precious data back.

On giving his laptop back to him i gave him that most important advice "If it ain't broken don't fix it".  i couldn't understand why he needed to update the bios in the first place. 

This type of repair can be very expensive and some manufacturer support engineers sometimes replace the motherboard rather than the cheaper solution of repair or replace the chip. In some cases this repair can cost up to or more than the original computer itself.

 

As this was a repair for a friend this cost him just one hours labour.

--Another gadget saved from the ever growing landfill--

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