Computer crashes while booting, fans won't start but everything else looks like it is

isaunier

Distinguished
Nov 6, 2011
5
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18,510
The other day my laptop suddenly shut down after about ten minutes of use, now it won't fully boot at all. It goes through BIOS and can reach the first screen of windows then shuts down. If I go into the BIOS it will shut down in a comparable amount of time (generally less than fifteen seconds from first powering) one thing I noticed is none of my fans are running, there are three one for each gpu, one for the CPU. They don't even try to spin, no flicks or nudges.

The laptop is a sager NP9370, which is a rebranding of a clevo p370em. It has in I7, 16 gigs of ram, two crossfired radeon 7970m a tb hardrive and a 60gig ssd boot drive. There have not been any recent hardware changes or major software changes.

I have tried resetting the accessible ram, the battery, making sure the fans were cleaned out completely, and tried resetting their plugs as well. I gave a cursory glance over the motherboard and didn't see and capacitors that looked like they may be bad, but also didn't look completely disassemble it so there may very well be more stuff I havent seen.

I have no idea where to start, if something similar happened with a desktop I would try swapping the psu out first but idk what the laptop equivalent to that would be..
 

ffg7

Splendid
Moderator
does your laptop have a health or hardware monitor in the bios to see what the cpu temps are at? sounds like the laptop is doing a thermal shutdown due to over heating as the fans are not spinning. the fans' connector(s), 2 pin or what?
 

isaunier

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Nov 6, 2011
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18,510

It doesn't stay up long enough to check anything out of the BIOS, I'm sure if I was very familiar with it the few seconds I have before it crashes would be enough to find something I spend to much time trying to find my way in it and it crashes. As well although heating makes the most sense because of the fans two things have me leaning against it. First when one of my desktops is overheating the longer it sits the more time I have before it crashes, so if I try to boot it again immediately after a crash it'll run for one or two seconds before going down again, but if I let it sit for 10 minutes I get a lot more time, the laptop is very consistent at about 15 seconds regardless of how long I wait between tries, I also tried sitting it on a box fan which has worked with my desktops before to give me more time with it on and that didn't affect the time at all. Then again with my desktops I've never had every single fan stop at once, usually it's a single fan either slowly dying or being caked with dust from me neglecting to clean it so it's very possible all three of the components with fans just reach the point where they need to shut down and cool off to a bootable point fast enough that the time looks the same . As far as the plugs I believe they were two pin, but I don't have it in front of me this moment to double check.
 

123printers

Commendable
Dec 23, 2016
2
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1,510
I had the same problem with hp printers and the 30 sec trick worked!!! Cleared all of the dust, cut the power, and held down the power button for 30 seconds and now I'm up and running again! Follow these steps and solve it easily.
Thank you,
 

isaunier

Distinguished
Nov 6, 2011
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18,510
Should anyone find this in the future one of the graphics cards had gone bad. I'm not sure how it was causing those symptoms but after removing it the computer now runs fine again.