how odd.

my t400 was working fine. I put it into hibernation, moved it few feet, and tried to start it up, and nothing!

the hard drive light becomes dim green, but the screen never shows information

if I put a boot CD in, it grunts and spins a time or two, but won't boot from that either.

f1 doesn't invoke bios

i tried it with the battery in, and with the battery out. I've removed all cards, and connections.

never had this problem before -- is there anything to try?

sorry for the odd caps here -- i'm using my backup x60 who's keyboard needs to be replaced

any suggestions will be appreciated before i run to a repair place.

cbk

i tried removing the RAM. without any ram i got an error code (beep) and with one of 2 replaced it still didn't work

Hi,

This happened to me twice before.

Try this first :

Remove battery. press 10 times the power on button and the last time hold it down for 30 secs.
put battery back on and try to reboot.

And this second (most likely will be needed if the CMOS memory is corrupted)

Remove battery
(if in doubt for the following consult the HMM which can be downloaded in the lenovo site)
Remove the 4 palm rest holding screws and the palm rest
Disconnect the yellow backup battery wait 30 seconds and remount it.
Screw back palm rest and insert battery.
It should work now.

If it still does not boot, it is a hardware problem => call for service.

Now, why does this happen ? I *think* this is caused by hibernating-closing the lid too quickly while still connected to the network ... but not sure yet.

I had exactly the same problem. After restart, all of a sudden my Lenovo R400 didn't boot up anymore. First I thought, well maybe it's caused by the new memory I inserted, so I removed it. But still, stuck with a blank screen and leds on, fan works, but no bootup or beep codes. Tried an external LCD, but blank screen, too. I already thought my system board or graphic card died, now right after my warranty ended
But thankfully I found this thread here with the post by user FTC, which saved me a huge amount of money I guess. Your second tip worked great for me, thank you You & the board rock

Cheers,
Pete

Hi,

Glad it helped. The same thing happened 2-3 times again since my original post 2 years ago. Always fixed by removing battery (and backup battery), so still not fully identified the cause, but definetly this is still something that can happen to this machines (CMOS corruption) in very specific scenarios.

After updating the BIOS (which, ironically, were supposed to fix this problem I didn't have before), my T400 will not boot unless the machine is either on AC power or the battery has more then ~50% charge left. The bootup sequence will start, the BIOS will post, but just after it gets through the boot loader the machine will just power off. Attempting to boot after this first occurance usually ends in it crashing at BIOS.

The battery light is always green, and after plugging into AC power, the battery shows a significant charge (40% on the lastest crash) once the machine actually boots. Attempting to re-update the BIOS gives a "You already have the newest BIOS" message, and I can't find the old version of the ant other website.

THANK YOU FTC ! Thanks to this I got my hibernation&batterydischarge-bricked R500 working again .

YOU ARE THE MAN !

I just want to vouche for this. I had this same problem. This is the second time that VMWare has screwed up my HD. After trying to install VMWare workstation, my T400 froze for a long time during the installation process. I had to turn off the computer and restart. The T400 went through the boot screen but then shutdown. After I tried restarting it, I just got a black screen with no BIOS prompt or logo screen. After rebooting many times, taking out the hard drive, testing the HD on another computer, etc..., I turned to the Internets.

So, I removed the CMOS battery and the memory. I plugged it back in and turned on the T400. It sat there with a black screen again. Shoots. Finally, after 10 seconds, I heard the error beeps! Thank god! Then, I plugged the memory back in and the CMOS battery, and now I'm able to see the logo and BIOS setup screen!

You the man, FTC! Thanks for that!

Thanks for the advice, all. I had a similar problem on my X120e; after the 'starting windows' screen everything would go black - starting up with the battery removed (on AC power), then putting battery back in and restarting seems to have solved it. -Aaron

FTC - I cannot thank you enough - you saved me at least $450! My next step was to buy a refurbished thinkpad from lenovo...

I purchased a used R400 6 months ago, and it worked fine and THEN - it was dead. No matter what I tried or internet suggestion I used, the computer wouldn't even try to boot (not even BIOS). Although I'm a computer programmer and work in an IT department (and consider myself pretty savvy), I couldn't find anything helpful on this problem. In addition, 2 guys I work with who work with advanced desktop support as their job and maintain all sorts of computers, including thinkpads, had pretty much given my computer a death certificate!

All I can say is you are the best - the fact that you found this out AND took the time to share - so glad there are people like you in this world!

I'm looking at a T400 on ebay and I wonder if this is the issue? The seller describes it as being it boots to BIOS on occasion but not every time it powers on.