Tecra A4 won't boot - switches off after 3 seconds

Hey all,
I really hope you can help me on this. Recently I bought a cheap Laptop Toshiba Tecra A4 at Ebay. It was said there is a hard drive defect only...it's not.
When I try to switch the laptop on the lamps go on and the DVD drive starts to spin..everything normal. But then after about 3 seconds it switches off before it can reach the bootscreen - like I would remove the power cable.
The very weird thing is that sometimes, let's say every 1 of 15 tries the laptop starts like it should and boots up from my linux live-CD. Then I can work for hours and nothing bad happens ... until I want to switch it on again. Then the game starts from the very beginning.
I already tried to:
- remove the defect hard disk
- remove the power cable only
- remove only the battery
- replace the RAM or use only one of the two
- to remove both RAM
- remove the power cable and the battery overnight to reset the CMOS
...nothing changed.
I would be very pleased if anyone could help me. So far I found only unanswered forum entries with that problem in the WWW - so at least, I am not the only one going mad :-)
Thanks a lot
Hans

Hans
I can't promise that this advice will be of any use to you but your symptoms seem similar to a problem that I had with my Tecra S3 when I tried to run it on battery only after an extended period (months) running only on its docking bay. I found that the battery was not charging properly and ceased to charge after it got to approximately 23% and would fail suddenly under use without giving any warning of battery depletion. When trying to restart the laptop, (before I had determined that the battery was faulty), I had symptoms similar to those you describe relating to shutting off before reaching the boot screen.
I would recommend you try running without the old battery present in the chassis, if the A4 will allow that. If that works for any duration exceeding the short limits you have been experiencing, I would try and temporarily source another battery (preferably with a provable 100% charge) from any source that you can manage. If this proves to be beneficial, you may need to invest in your own new battery. But if not you may have another issue with the physical connection between the power cable jack point and the battery (maybe a dry solder joint that is temperature sensitive). To determine that would probably require Toshiba hardware technical support, or at least knowledge of the motherboard circuits and some circuit testing tools. It could be costly as well.
The very least you need to be able to do if you can restart the laptop for any length of time is to determine the state of the battery using any tools you may have on your Linux live-CD. You might investigate the BIOS version of the A4 and see if that helps by upgrading the ACPI interfaces, but a BIOS upgrade could be risky if you can not get reliable power.
Hope that helps.
Regards Tony

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