tg wrote:
I have a sony vaio laptop VPCEF3E1E with a faulty motherboard - the
laptop won't come on properly. The screen is blank and when the power
button is pressed the three panel lights flicker briefly and that's
all, there's no fan action. I'm given to understand this is a common
fault with these laptops and it comes down to a component on the
motherboard. Problem is I can't find out which component it is. I'm
handy with a soldering iron so if anyone is familiar with this and
knows the rogue component I'd be grateful to know.
The writing on the motherboard says:
HannStar J MV-6 94V-0
D A ONE 8MB C60
REV: C
Laptop service tag is: C104NQ4S

I recently worked on a Sony laptop that had had Windows 7 64 installed over the
origional Vista 64. It had an interesting failure to boot. The left of the 3
LEDs would turn on when you hit the power button, but the HD LED would not. This
would happen almost every time I rebooted it. The only way I could get it to
boot properly was to leave it powered down with the battery removed for several
hours. Then it would usually boot right up.

I was thinking that this must be a motherboard or power supply problem, but I
finally tried restoring the origional Vista OS from the recovery partition on
the disc. I backed up the drive, then did the Vista recovery. Since then, it has
booted up properly every time. I'm guessing that there may have been a problem
with the boot sector on the drive. I thought about restoring the origional boot
sector from the backup and testing to see if the problem comes back, but haven't
done that.

If your problem is similar, it's possible that re-writing the boot sector might
solve it.