I have an old generic Pentium laptop. The label on the bottom says Multimedia Notebook Computer, model number 86 and FCC ID: FMA86T. The Swedish reseller's label says LapLine 8630T, although it was sold under many names. It's one of those with a little LCD indicator display below the screen for indicating battery status, caps/num ock and such. The BIOS screen says SystemSoft BIOS for UMC8890 version 1.01 (2487-10), NoteBook Computer Version 1.20.1.01 07-05-96-39C.

The symptoms of the patient: it starts to the BIOS screen that I mentioned, and gets no further and seems crashed. No RAM count, drive enumeration etc. I've tried various things to look for a sign of life, like pressing caps and num lock (no reaction) or mashing keys in the hopes that it would fill up the key buffer and beep. But no beep was heard. I've also tried reseating the two 8 MB RAM sticks, and booting without the RAM sticks in, but still no difference. There's also a jumper next to the (absolutely tiny) BIOS battery which I've removed in case that would help somehow, but still nothing.

Additional information:
It has no battery and runs from an external 12 V DC adapter. I know laptops, even ones marked 15 V can often run on 12 V, just not charge the battery. But the label explicitly says 10-20 VDC, so that's not likely to be an issue either way.

It also has no HDD or HDD caddy. (Never had while in my possession.) There's some history of how I've solved that in the past. I removed the CD drive a long time ago and placed an IDE to CF card adapter there instead. The BIOS wouldn't recognize this "HDD" since it was on the CD drive's IDE channel, but I found a software that would scan all IDE channels and detect the CF card and add it to the BIOS drive table. I put this on a boot floppy which I then set up to chainload the HDD using osme method, probably GRUB4DOS. But I can't find the boot floppy now. I would like to find this software again, if I get this laptop working again in general. Or better yet, another solution like it that doesn't rely on the flaky floppy drive, like a BIOS hack.

Another potential thing I could try if it could help is that I have PCMCIA network cards that I might be able to burn an option ROM to, but I think I've tried that in the past and the laptop just wouldn't detect the option ROM at all. So maybe this BIOS just doesn't support option ROM?

I could also potentially build a POST code display for the LPT port if this BIOS is known to output POST codes.

It's frustrating though because the laptop apparently isn't 100% dead since it does show something on screen and it has worked in the past. I just don't know what to try next at this point. Grateful for any help.