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Blink of death.

T20-T23 Series and T30. NOT for T25-Retro.
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kengeo
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Blink of death.

#1 Post by kengeo » Thu Feb 13, 2014 6:40 am

Hi everyone, I have a T21 with XP which has been very reliable for years, but when I switched on today I got what I believe is known as the 'Blink of death' (a quick blink of the hd light) Is this terminal? I removed the keyboard, checked that the fan was free, checked the cmos battery, re-assembled but still only the 'Blink'. Is there a fix other than the dustbin.

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Re: Blink of death.

#2 Post by rkawakami » Thu Feb 13, 2014 2:19 pm

Here's the latest of what I know of about BoD (could be superseded by a search of the forum's posts as I haven't kept up to date on this matter that much):

- It's terminal in the sense that once you have it, it doesn't really fully go away on its own.
- You might find that removing all power from the system (battery & AC) and waiting a couple of days will restore the T21 to operation again.
- The problem is thought to be with one or more of the power controller chips detecting the wrong voltage and/or current at power on and preventing the system from fully powering up.
- The root cause most likely is with the passive components (resistor/capacitor) rather than the power controller itself; i.e., changing the chip may not fix the problem.
- Swapping out the motherboard may simply delay the return of the problem as the replacement board could also be "infected" with this issue.
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DRobinson
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Re: Blink of death.

#3 Post by DRobinson » Wed Mar 19, 2014 8:55 pm

I had read somewhere that someone used a pullup resistor affixed to said chip to fix the issue. Google around for it.

Here is one search that could find a solution...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Blink+o ... p+resistor
IBM T20 (2647-86U) - 900MHz/512MB - 2x8GB CF - Atheros AR5413 mini-pci - #! IBM T23 - 16GB CF - #!
IBM T42 (2373-JTU) - 1.7GHz/1GB - HM160HC IBM 560x - 233MHz/96MB IBM 701c
Lenovo T601 (8897/2007) - T9300 - 4GB - 32GB SSD - Xubuntu 14.04

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