Spinning this one out from the perfect retro laptop thread. Here's a link to that discussion, read over there first: Re: The quest for the perfect retro laptop: a saga

The summary: Got myself a CTX EzBook 800 laptop for $20, working in great shape. Took it apart to check for any VARTA batteries fixing to leak, and found a soldered barrel battery on the board that had indeed begun to do so. After cleaning the damage, it POSTed once after, only when I applied pressure to the board, and then never again.

My theory is that cleaning up the battery damage had caused some very weak connections to break that were previously intact, specifically around a connector for an interconnect board. The board has several bad traces as a result of the damage as well, but they appear to all go to the PC Card slots and the system previously booted with them either way.

It was just suggested that I could be dealing with damage from the way I removed the battery, which was to break it off the board with pliers. I did this in order to avoid further disassembly, and because there was significant corrosion that would have made soldering difficult. From what Thermalwrong said, there's a chance the stress from that could have caused some sort of damage to other solder points.

I'm not entirely convinced of this, but it's certainly a possibility - and it relates to an issue I'm having that's preventing me from doing more advanced troubleshooting. I can't for the life of me get the motherboard out. It's a very large board, and takes up the entirety of the bottom chassis, and it doesn't want to budge at all. There's no screws anywhere as well from what I can tell. Worse, the floppy drive which is a removable module, is completely seized in place. I've put a ton of pressure on it (and yes it's unlocked, it's meant to be user-swappable) but it won't budge in the slightest. This is likely what's preventing me from removing the motherboard.

I really do need to get the board out, as I'd like to reflow the other side of the large connector for the daughterboard, which i can't get to with the board installed. I'd also like to inspect the back of the board for corrosion and any other damage, as it's likely that corrosion has traveled to that side of the board.

Can anyone lend a helping hand? I did a video on the laptop here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdiJ9F84NSU
The video shows how it's laid out pretty well.