Taking apart Toshiba Satellite A60 or A65 laptop
Toshiba Satellite A60 and A65 used to be a very popular laptop a few years ago, many people still have these laptop. This guide will show you how to take apart these laptops.
I’ve seen many Satellites A60/A65 but it looks like all of them have very similar problems:
1. Laptop tends to overheat. In this case you can remove the keyboard and clean up the fan and heat sink with compressed air.
2. Onboard memory failure. Sorry guys, if that’s the case then you’ll have to replace the motherboard.
3. Power jack failure. This problem is fixable but you’ll have to take the whole thing apart and replace or resolder the power jack.
You can find more information about these common failures here.
June 27th, 2008 at 7:13 am
I also have a Toshiba M65 that is failing to boot as has been described in many places. I just talked to Toshiba and was told that “they have had problems with that motherboard”. Ofcourse, they also take no responsibility for selling a defective product. Basically, I am out $1000 for buying their crap. When are people going to wake up and do something about these thieves. Isn’t there a attorney out there that got screwed too? It’s time for customers to unite and file class action suits to get some justice. Count me in!
June 17th, 2008 at 12:42 am
now my keyboard doesnt work it lights up when you turn on the laptop but then when everything is loaded it doesnt do anything
June 16th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Jose Lopez,
1. Try enabling the touch pad with Fn+F9 keys. Hold down Fn and press on F9 to enable or disable the touch pad.
2. Make sure the touch pad cable is properly connected to the motherboard.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
My touchpad doesnt work after I open my laptop because the cd drive wouldnt work so I open it. But since then I unable to use my touchpad. Any solution???
May 16th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I deleted the sound soft wear by mistake and can not get it back i downloaded the driver and nothing, i used the backup disk that came with the lap top and still nothing. can anyone out there help?
Tom
April 7th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Hi everyone,
hopefully someone can help me with this problem i have. I have a a65-s1065, and im having serious booting issues. it will not boot from a cd because the boot protocool is set to PXE. which i learned is not supposed to be like that, so thats my first question, how do i set it to something else? and i also got a tip to remove my CMOS battery or my RTC battery…problem is it doesn’t seem to be anywhere. so if anyone as any insights on how to fix this problem please help and leave me and email at cheunit07@Hotmail.com
March 22nd, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Thanks for the guide. It was very helpfull.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
I have a couple of problems regarding my A65.
a.) How do you tighten the LCD hinges?
b.) The PCMCIA card eject button popped out, and I may have broken it while trying to put it back. I have a wireless card in the slot right now and I can’t eject it. How do I fix this? Is it possible to get another eject button and just pop it right in?
Thanks in advance for the replies. This site is great!
February 11th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
The guides are great but I can’t find my modle. I am have screen issues and I see some that are close but not quite there. I can find a modle2435-s255 on the bottom and can’t seem to locate the modle on the toshiba web site. please help if you can?!? you could just email the info need if you don’t want to put up a page or please tell me where I can find it on your site. Thank you very much and keep up the great work you guys do.
January 27th, 2008 at 8:59 am
I have an A60 that the display does not work, otherwise all works fine. I can view if I attached an external monitor. Dead screen or bad video cable? Any suggestions how to check?
January 24th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Thanks alot for your site. I ve not seen any that has what I ve just seen on this. I do appreciate the help. I am going to bookmark and be back more often.
January 21st, 2008 at 12:53 am
Hi
I have a Toshiba Laptop A65 my USP ports stoped working when i plug a devise in it says the device not recognized. Also when i plug in my ipod it says device not recongnized but it will charge it.
I was wander if I get a PC card with USP ports on it if it will fix my problem.
Thank you
January 20th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
O.K., The next morning I started the A65 cold and on battery only and the BSOD is back. Lets get that class action suit going, it looks like I need a new board, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for it myself. (sigh) Mark R.
January 20th, 2008 at 1:11 am
Re: A65 With ATI Radeon mobility 7000IGP error.
I was tending to agree with you and attempted to get memtest, but for some reason I can’t get it to work. But I have no flickering or vertical lines in my display, and no errors while running high demand programs, so I un-installed the ati graphics driver from the add remove programs and then let it reinstall from windows (not from disc, but from the C: drive), it has been working fine ever since, and I have been turning it on and off all night and watching streaming video for hours with no ill effects. I noticed the ramdacs were listed as 350mhz before the change, and are now listed as 400mhz and window transitions open and close much smoother. Shut down and reboot is much faster too. I’m now of the opinion the drivers on the restore disc were updated ones and not compatible with my particular unit. An A65 does come in many configurations. I will however keep the onboard ram in mind if I start having trouble again.
It seems to me the A65 and others are a design flaw, and a class action suite should be started against Toshiba. I would certainly get in line for that, even if all I got was a new motherboard. It is wrong to make so many people pay for their poor judgment. Thank you again for your time and quick response, I guess I’m one of the lucky ones! (said with fingers crossed) Mark R.
January 19th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Hello,
I have problem with toshiba satellite A60-205,
Evntually the sound drive is not working any more. I could not listen to music.
Also, I have problem with weird noise and it over heats.
Any suggestion is welcomed.
January 19th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Mark,
Sounds like you have bad RAM. If I remember correctly, Windows has some protection against failing RAM in the operating system. However, it doesn’t have access to this protection when starting up or shutting down. If you have a working CD burner, you should definitely download and run this program (it’s free to burn yourself and it will not hurt anything):
http://www.memtest86.com/
Also make sure you pull out any RAM from the expansion slot that you might have added to be sure. If it shows you have errors in your RAM, you’re basically screwed. The easiest thing you can do is not waste any more time with it and just buy a new laptop. And remember, don’t buy Toshiba!
On a follow-up note, I tried pulling the RAM off the motherboard but I did a shoddy job. I wasn’t careful and wound up scraping up stuff and causing shorts. So it died.
January 19th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Hello, this is a great site! I have a problem that is stumping me. I thought I had an overheating problem with my Toshiba A65 S 1063. It would run for aprox 10 to 15 mins before the hard drive would stop seeking. shortly afterwards the computer would become unresponsive and I’d get the BSOD error and it would reboot. I tried blowing it out and got minuscule amounts of lint but it still did it. what I ended up doing was getting a new hard drive which solved both the rebooting and the supposed heating problem. Now the thing will run for hours without missing a lick, and the fan seems to cycle up and down properly as I increase and decrease work load. the problem is when I shut down and reboot it restarts multiple times, sometimes showing a BSOD error and dump, or the screen that says “sorry, windows has encountered an error” and gives me a choice of restart procedures. Even just logging off the network will produce a “windows has recovered from an error, send or don’t send” dialogue box when I log back on. It states that ATI Radeon Mobility 7000 IGP is the cause, but everything else works fine. I’m inclined to think either the settings are wrong, or windows is loosing track of the chip somehow rather than the chip itself being bad as once it boots it performs flawlessly for hours until I shut it down again. This was a clean install of XP pro from a Toshiba factory technician’s restore disc specific to the A65 on a new hard drive. The clock never looses it’s setting so it isn’t the CMOS battery. I have installed SP3 to see if that helps and nada. I have downloaded the proper Omega drivers for the ATI chip, as the latest ATI drivers no longer support the Radeon Mobility 7000 IGP, but I would like to get a second opinion before doing anymore to it. Got any ideas? Thank you.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:27 am
I’m having a few problems getting my keyboard off it doesn’t seem to keen on the idea…any ideas?
January 18th, 2008 at 1:25 am
Hi all
What a great website. I have an equium a60 laptop and while reflashing the bios the computer shut down. now i have a very nice paperweight. After asking toshiba for there help they advised that all i could do is to replace the motherboard because they wont supply just a bios chip. Can anyone advise where i could get a bios chip from or is there a jumper setting i can try to see if the bios has a protected area so that this will alow me to load the protected area and then reflash the bios back to standered. Thanks for any help or advice..
peter.
January 9th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Hi all
Just got this annoying Gericom laptop to work, finally. It had the infamous bad onboard RAM fault where one of the chips fails, causing instability. This can be heat related, in fact one or all of the chips can overheat noticeably in this failure mode.
Unfortunately, most if not all laptops do not allow you to disable onboard RAM, requiring an expensive motherboard replacement or SMD rework.
A simple fix however is to download the datasheet for the RAM chips, in this case Winbond W942516AH-75, and locate the CS or /CS line on pin 24. Connect this to Vdd via a resistor or wire link and all the onboard RAM should be disabled.
If this works but there are still odd memory faults but less frequently, try a lower speed module. If this works fine then remove all four bad chips, as they may be interfering with the data lines even with CS disabled and all should be well.
On this one, I found that 256MB PC2700 would fail but 128MB would work fine, am going to try the chip removal technique to see if this has any effect.
So far so good, although the laptop will now only work with a stick fitted.
Hope this helps some Toshiba/Gericom/Compaq/etc owners.
Regards, -A
January 4th, 2008 at 5:51 am
Hello and congrats for this great website.
I just received a pair of hinges to replace mine from Ebay but they don’t rotate, anyone have any idea why, I am missing something?
Cheers
L
December 29th, 2007 at 7:40 am
I broke my laptop a few months ago and i found this perfect website too late. I need to change my motherboard in Satelite A60-302, PSA60E-00J036G3, but i cant find part nummber for it. Could you anybody to help me how to get a part nummber?
December 18th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
I followed the instructions that were given exactly, every step and i ended up breaking the laptop. I somehow “fried” the motherboard Just By Touching It, and now it will cost 250 dollars just to replace the motherboard, i will never listen to any idiot giving instructions on anything on the internet again. Beware, you may break something valuable and not even realize it.
Instructions: 0/100
December 4th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Just saw this – comment #93.
Apparently removing the chips does work!
December 4th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Great article! This confirms what I already suspected about these laptops. Toshiba should issue a recall on A65.
For anyone else who has dead memory, I worked out a solution using Linux. It seems like Toshiba uses the additional storage first and then jumps to the onboard chip. So I started up Ubuntu with the “mem=380M” option and got it going. Just run MemTest to see where your problem is. You might be stuck with 250M or whatever. Still have the video problems however.
Also, question for cj2600: what would happen if I just removed one of the chips and didn’t replace it? Do you think it would run?
November 20th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Hi, and thaks for all the information that you show us here.
My Satellite A60 – 682 Hard drive has become dead. I’m looking for some replacement but other 2.5” HD i have tryied don’t get recogniced by the BIOS i upgrade to 1.90 and still nothing.
Anybody knows were can i buy a HD for that computer?
Thanks a lot for the tutorial.
November 15th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Hi all!
My laptop (Satellite A60) overheats, so I wanted to blow off the dust. I removed the keyboard (as written in steps 5-8), but there was no dust there! I think, it’s somewhere deeper. Maybe something else should be removed from there (the fan, …). If you succeded (practically!) in this, please tell me what to do.
Thanks in advance.
November 13th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Lovely site – inspires confidence.
I was removing the DVD Rom on my A60 to replace with a DVD MultiWriter I bought on ebay. Key stage is remove the B2 screw that holds the DVD drive into its bay. Its at the back of the DVD accessible from underneath – next (east) of the RAM cover. Little LED torch extreamly useful to see things. Also see post #11
November 2nd, 2007 at 10:53 am
RE post # 17 by me. Never mind ? on getting the “hidden latches”. I turned on another light and saw that there were another 2 screws. SO I’ll be able to proceed and check out the on/off switch issue.
November 1st, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Perhaps a tip on getting the final latches in the front loose so the top cover comes off. I have all bottom screws out DVD and hidden screws, keyboard off however, the top is held in seemingly by the two latches in the front. I have depressed them, pushed them toward the rear. essentially tried all I seem to sense will work to no avail.
Again I am trying to access the bottom of the on off switch.
Thanks again!
Bob