I am in the process or resurrecting this laptop. When I acquired it about 6 years ago the seller mentioned that it had even sat in a garden for a short while, but of course like all of these series of Toshibas seem to have, it had the leaking batteries. (I also have a working 480CDT). Back then I couldn't get it powering on, eventhough I replaced a blown fuse on the power supply board. Now that my electronics knowledge has improved since then, I have dusted this off and am trying again.

I found a shorted capacitor on the power/HDD board and replaced it with one from a donor 480CDT board and this started to power the laptop on.

Thanks to posts I read that was replied to by Thermalwrong, I was able to use his workings to repair traces and put bodge wireless to get the onboard AND so-dimm memory working correctly to a point it will now POST and I was able to get it to boot a CD once.

The issues I can't seem to resolve are:

1. The cooling fan will not turn on. I have tried to look for shorted caps and resistors in that region to no avail. I have swapped the fan and even supplied a direct 5V to it and it does function.

2. With any HDD (from a 400 series) or IDE to CF adapter I connect, the CMOS does see the drive but will hang at POST. I can't boot from a CD with any HDD connected. The drives do spin, and as far as i can tell it appears to try the correct seeking motions during POST.

3. When starting cold, it will hang on the "Toshiba Video BIOS" screen. Left long enough, it will get to a POST screen and may hang after completing the RAM test.. even when saying "Test complete".

I feel like the inconsistency of the boot may be capacitor related on the lower power/HDD board. Unfortunately, the board in the 480CDTs are different and don't have the additional cable connection between it and the motherboard the 440CDT has. I suspect this cable supplies something to the port replicator port.

It would be most appreciated if anyone with solid knowledge of these series could reply and suggest there thoughts and where i could start to look to resolve these issues. I wouldn't have thought that the standard battery corrossion would have affected the fan or the HDD.

Thanks!