So I took delivery of my lovely new FW16 today. Assembly went fine but unfortunately when I power on the power button lights up but I don’t get anything from the display. I tried:
taking it apart again and reseating everything
2)Checking that the midplate cable was attached. This was an issue initially and plugging it in properly helped in a way I’ll explain below but still no dice.
3)taking the GPU plate thing off and rescrewing it back on (I didn’t fully remove the gpu unit and I didn’t try swapping it for the blank expansion bay yet)
4)Just charging the thing up for ages (this also helped but not quite enough).
When I first tried turning it on the battery was dead so the led next to the usb socket I’m charging from was orange. When I charged it up a bit that led went white but trying to turn it on again the power light went on but the led changed to blinking orange and white. That’s when I discovered that I hadn’t plugged the midplate cable back in on reassembly. Fixing that gets me to the current state. The power light turns on. The led next to the USB-c I’m using for power stays solid white througout. Occasionally the fans turn on just to get me excited. But I don’t see anything on the display and can’t proceed to install any kind of OS until that is working.
Any advice? Anyone seen this before? The other similar threads I’ve seen on here have been from people installing non-standard wifi cards and the like, but I haven’t done anything like that - I’ve literally just installed the ram and two ssds that I bought with it.
How long die wait until you took it apart? AMD is known to take a little longer for memory training. Takse usually a couple of minute, depending on the size of your RAM.
About 20mins. Also I’m using the stock framework powersupply in case that’s relevant, but did try with another charger briefly just in case that helped (which it didn’t).
I know how sad it must feel to not have it all working first time.
When testing, you can leave the keyboard, mid-plate disconnected, and use a USB keyboard instead. It saves having to put everything back together each time.
If you press the power button, and the LED on the side of the laptop starts flashing after a few seconds, please video the flashing and post the video and link it to here. The flashing pattern means something, and can help diagnose the problem.
As others have mentioned the AMD mainboard sometimes needs a while for “memory training”. Sometimes even 15 mins, but I think you say above that you waited 20 mins. There is also a certain colour the LED goes while it is memory training.
You can force a reset of the BIOS by pressing the chassis switch.
Slowly press the chassis open switch/case switch 10 times, holding each press for 2 seconds. Release, wait for the red blink on the mainboard LED, then repeat this step.
If the system became discharded during transit or waiting in the factory, the “reset” might help.
Is it right for us to assume you got the FW16, dGPU, RAM and SSD all from FW ?
If not all from FW, please state the exact make/module of the non-FW bits.
You should be able to get to something displayed on the screen, even without the keyboard / mid-plate connected.
If you can, check that the display cable is well plugged in both ends of it. The mainboard end, and also the one of the display end.
It cannot display anything on the display if the RAM is not working. So, probably remove the SSD while testing and focus on getting the RAM working. Once you get the display working, you can plug the SSD back in.
1)I have a bunch of weird and wonderful mechanical usb keyboards so I should be able to rustle something up.
2)I’ll video the blinking later as I have to leave this for a bit and go do some personal things.
3)yeah at least 20 but I didn’t do it that long the first time so I hope I didn’t mess something up by pulling the ripcord too early.
4)OK cool I tried this and ith seems to have done something although no display yet.
5)I did get everything from framework. Not sure what you mean by GDP but I’m probably just being dumb.
6)Good to know.
7)I did although this is a bit fiddly so I’m worried about making this worse
8)OK I’ll do that next.
Sorry about the GDP, I meant dGPU, the expansion bay faster GPU.
Some people have had faulty batteries that cause problems booting.
It might be worth removing the battery, but be very careful removing that, as the pins on the connector bend and break very easily.
For (4) what do you mean by seems to have done something, what did it do?
Well when the case is open normally the intrusion detection light is blinking steadily then when I do that it briefly does another sequence of colours. It doesn’t actually power on the display. Here’s a video. Around 20s in I finish the reset and you can see the colour sequence I’m talking about. Hopefully you get see it from this gif. I couldn’t figure out how to upload an actual video and had to shrink it quite a lot to get within the filesize limit.
The LED flashes I read as:
W, 5G, 1R, 6G, 1O
B G B G G G B B
Looking at this page to decode them:
W, 5G, 1R, 6G, 1O ← No touchpad detected (which is obvious, you removed it), RAM OK.
B G B G G G B B == 10100011 → 1100 0101 → BIOS Code: 0xC5
Summary:
Your RAM is fine, something else is at fault.
FW have not published the BIOS Code for the FW16, so although it is saying 0xC5, we don’t know what that means.
Conclusion:
Your only way forward is to contact FW support.
You might have luck trying steps from this thread, as they had the same BIOS 0xC5 code.
Commonly referred to as the RAM shuffle.
But my best guess is FW support will replace the mainboard. As per this thread:
Sorry to hear your new laptop is not coming to life straight away. You were probably doing all the right things. I suspect your display cable or the display itself might have an issue. (Probably just the display cable)
If you can look up the guides on how to replace the display for the Framework Laptop 16 this will point you to what you need to be looking at. Remember to be extra careful removing and reseating the display cables!
There are lots of pins in there and if you have adult fingers like me, they are giant trying to get some of the little connectors seated carefully. There are two ends of the display cable. I would check both ends. Start with the one on the mainboard but the one on the back of the display has been the one recently that has come loose a few times recently with fresh shipments. Long flight overseas and who knows how the box was handled on its journey to your home.
Like @James3 said, best course is to start a case with Framework support so they know what is going on. We can try to help you through the weekend; though support may not get back to you until Monday.
Let us know how it goes and welcome to the community!
Thanks. Watching the guide I actually realised the thing I was checking that I thought might be the display connector was actually something else. I can’t actually check the display connector at the moment because I can’t get the bezel to come off. The guide says to slide your fingernail in at the corner but that’s really not working for me because my bezel has no gaps at all anywhere, and I’m worried about damaging it if I do end up having to return it.
Support did get back to me with a nice message proposing a slightly different reset process (basically removing all expansion cards, ssds, ram, power cable and the battery, leave it for 15mins to power down, then put the battery ssds, ram and power cable back in and do the reset process with the button. This unfortunately didn’t seem to do anything in particular.
So the state of play at the moment is I’ve become rather more familiar than I was planning to become with the interior of the thing but I haven’t actually got it booting yet. Still remaining positive though.
Oh wow. James3 I just saw the two threads at the bottom of your message. Removing one ram stick did the trick. Thank you so much! The issue seems to be the slot (slot 1 seems broken for me like for that other person) rather than the RAM itself because I tried both SIMMs in slot zero and either way it starts up.
