Laptop won’t start but power LEDs turn on

There is nothing more depressing with a laptop than opening it up, pressing the power key and having the LED status light and screen backlight turn on but nothing happen.

CAUSES

There is a wide gamut of causes of why a laptop won’t start up. With millions of transistors on its motherboard, the probability of them all working can seem impossible.

• Missing/damaged RAM (best case, easiest to fix)
• Damaged display screen (ebay a replacement)
• Failed BIOS (needs to be reflashed)
• Failed CPU/Processor (replace the entire motherboard)
• Damaged Video Card (replace the entire motherboard)
• Cracked Motherboard (ebay a replacement laptop same brand/model, possibly with a crack screen if yours works)

WHAT TO DO NEXT

• Connect an external display to see if it is just the video/screen that is damaged, especially if the hard drive is reading, its a good sign.
• Remove and reinstall the RAM, if you have multiple sticks of memory, try installing only one incase one of them has failed
• Reflash the BIOS (see below)
• Remove and reinstall the processor, this takes alot of work, and they rarely become unseated. Its a good last ditch try before spending money, but you will probably have to replace the motherboard/processor.

MY SOLUTION

Since my issue was on a newly purchased laptop that was factory refurbished, the unit had to be working before it left the repair facility. I booted the unit up countless times and got nothing to display. Out of shear stubbornness, I kept doing this while I was waiting to talk to tech support. I kept pressing F2 to get into the BIOS. After about 50 restarts (I was on hold for a while), it booted into the BIOS.  After leaving the BIOS, the laptop started up to Windows. It worked, until I restarted it again, and it went back to doing nothing.

So I restarted the laptop about 50-75 times. I finally got it into the BIOS again and there I reflashed the BIOS. I’ve been using this laptop for months after and it never had another startup problem since.

This is a dream ending, otherwise start looking on ebay for replacement parts.