System76 Galago UltraPro (Gala1) power issues ..

[KernSpy]

Hello all,

Thinking it might be time to retire/toss my laptop from 2014. The problem with the thing is - its not turning on. It might take 1 or 100 power button presses to get it to power up. Once it does, it boots up and runs fine. Doing updates is a real pain in the butt. The power supply seems fine and the battery still takes a charge. I can unplug the charger and it runs on battery. The mechanical hard drive died a little over a year ago and I replaced it with a solid state model - Crucial MX500. I'm pretty sure that the problem isn't the power button, but something beyond that. Likely a problem on/with the motherboard? Anyway, a friend mentioned selling it on eBay, but I don't have a seller account and the shipping in/from Canada would be very expensive. Not sure what to do with it.


MX-19.2_x64 | System76 Galago UltraPro / Clevo W740SU | Intel Core i7-4770HQ | Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200 | 16 GB DDR3 | Intel 530 series mSATA SSD - 240-GB | Crucial MX500 (500 GB) SSD | Intel HD Audio.

[manyroads]

Sounds like a power button issue from what you described... have you run BIOS diagnostics on the unit? They are often helpful.

[Huckleberry Finn]

Doing updates is a real pain

Why?

[KernSpy]

Doing updates is a real pain

Why?

Meaning updates requiring a restart(s) of the machine. It gets really tiresome just sitting there pressing
the power button for long periods of time.

[KernSpy]

Sounds like a power button issue from what you described... have you run BIOS diagnostics on the unit? They are often helpful.

It may be, but I feel something else is going on. I didn't, but probably should have looked around in there. Perhaps resetting to defaults?

I just found a page about the gala1 having a power-up issue and the fix is to re-flash the bios. Luckily, there is a working download link for the bios file.

Snargawok - The Ultrapro is still doing its workhorse thing beautifully after 5 years albiet with a worn battery. Roughly every year however, a problem re-occurs where pressing the power button to turn the laptop on results in the light coming on, then going off after about 2 seconds. If this is repeated, the system eventually POSTs and boots up normally after 20 or so tries. The fix for this situation is to reflash the bios. I’m not sure exactly how this fix works but i suspect something to do with the “Erasing NVRAM” during bios flash ...

https://www.jabawok.net/?p=137

I'm going to do this and will report back ..

Thanks :)

[KernSpy]

Just a quick update .. I've put the bios file on a bootable usb stick. Been trying to get it to startup, but no luck. Must have pressed
the power button over 200 times and no go. Perhaps it made it's final startup the last time I messed with it. Anyway, will keep
trying .. for awhile.