~Toughbooktalk~

I'll just about guarantee it's the BIOS.

It sounds like it was setup for in a vehicle that had a remote screen and the CF19 was mounted in the trunk.
No battery, so it would only work on the adapter.

That could be it, although these machines were, to my knowledge, previously used in lab conditions (for testing) though they could have been testing field conditions. It seems odd that there's no way to change the settings for this in the BIOS, but I've been through the whole shebang and doesn't seem to be any settings that could alter it.

Thanks again!

Panasonic did custom bios a bit. It makes the units a bit more idiot proof, I guess.

These units are used to run automated machines also...That could require some funky bios's.

The only light show or lack thereof I have seen was bad or no ram BUT this does not sound like that. I go with Shawn's answers (as always).

Minor sidetrack: just for fun I ran a strings command on the update binary to look for a full list of command arguments and came up with this.


Usage> %s [switches] filename
switches:
-mMachineName : Specify machine name
-f : Wait for no key, update forced
-f0 : No key input needed but can check successfull update
-r : Reboot even if power-off sequence is supported
-a : Use APM to Check AC and Battery status.
or > %s -rchk version
where version is the expected BIOS version (such as 1.23)
If current version is newer than expected, exit code is 0
If current version is equal to expected, exit code is 1
If current version is older than expected, exit code is 2
Otherwise 255 will be returned
or > %s -mlist
Print supported machines list.

-rchk
-mlist
-cboot
-partial
-sum=
-wbd
-rbd
-wlt
-rlt
-wdd
-rdd
-whole
-wpc
-rpc
-sec
-sc3
-gen
-issec
-entire

Nice.

Well, isn't that annoying.

I'll play around with it a bit more and see if I can't make it do anything -- Failing that, I'll talk to the prior owner!

Thank you for your time!

Well, I've managed to solve this problem in a remarkably counter intuitive way. I was prodding around in the BIOS and swapped the display preference from "internal" to "external" and now it boots just fine!

Figured I'd post this solution here for anyone in future having a similar problem.

To reiterate, when the flag in the bios was set to "internal display," the machine would not post without a monitor connected and battery removed. With the flag set to "external display" it now powers on and uses the internal display with no issues.

Bizarre, eh?

Thank you all again for all of your assistance! Special thanks to Shawn

Odd....

Well, it turns out the issue is more intermittent than I thought.

After replacing the hard drive to try a Windows 7 install (without destroying the install it came with) it required the dance with the external monitor to get it to boot again. Went into the BIOS and toggled external/internal monitor, and it worked again, allowing shut down, sleep, hibernate, without any problems.

I then remembered I had an SSD to pop in there, and did so. Same issue, but have not been able to get it to start up at all, through any combination of battery, power, monitor, or anything similar plugged in.

When I get home tonight, Im going to check the voltage of the BIOS battery. I'm not familiar with the architecture of these machines -- is the BIOS battery strictly for keeping the RTC running, or does it also preserve BIOS settings? Older machines tend to require the battery to preserve the settings where newer machines will write them to NVRAM.

Thanks!