Steam deck (LCD model) will, at no point, turn on unless plugged into charger or hooked up to the dock, regardless of how much battery is left. No response when trying to do things like booting into bios or anything else. Works perfectly fine when plugged in, docked to TV or standalone. No feedback at all, either, from buttons or trackpad haptics either when unplugged.
I’ve done a bios/firmware reset thing while plugged in and let that go for a while, following the advice of a Steam community forum (not sure whether the blinking power indicator thing is supposed to stop blinking when it’s done, but I definitely let it go for longer than the forum post was saying). Went through the process of going through and enabling the main channel OS updates as well through dev settings and updating didn’t fix it.
Have taken the backplate off and everything looks fine (I’m not an expert on mechanical things, though) and thankfully no spicy death pillow.
Any advice? At this point I’m even willing to back up anything important and do a factory reset if I have to. Also, if need be, I have a photo of the internals just in case I need to show it (again, not good with electronics on the hardware side of things).
Keep calm and contact support. They are responsive, nice and will help you. I had a very similar thing, if not exactly the same. They gave me instructions, some of them I already read online, some of them not. It felt hopeless and it went back and forth multiple time until it suddenly worked again. They really know their stuff. In the end it was something with the base OS version.
Definitely planned on contacting support later when I have enough time to sit down with my deck and try a few things first. And if nothing works or if warranty doesn’t cover whatever is going on, I planned on just using that specific deck as a micro desktop and wait to see if I could get a refurbished replacement as an absolute worst case scenario when financial aid for next college quarter comes in, if the price of getting it fixed isn’t cheaper.
Just contact support. That will get the ball rolling and they have a much better idea of what to try/do.
It will save you a headache.
I understand the tinker approach and the itch to figure it out yourself, but get onto the support As said, they really know their stuff.