Thinkpads Forum

Hi,
I have an A21e that suddenly decided to leave me. I brought it to a (non-authorised) repairshop to controll the HDD, memory, battery etc. but he said there was nothing he could do, and that it was probably a dead Mobo.

Now I've had it in my closet for a while, but when I found this forum I thought at least give it a shot and see if someone recognizes my problem. If it is possible to fix it could rather do that than keep/sell it as spares.

I thought it better to post it in this general forum rather than in then specific series, since the symptom could possibly be general.

SYMPTOMS:
When I press the power button you can hear a little double tick after half a second if you listen carefully. No CPU fan, no HDD, nothing.

With power adapter plugged in, the (power) LED shines, and when power button is pressed the LED goes out (flashes two times in sync with the little "tick-tick") and remains off until power button is released (then it lights up again).

When this first happened I tried to start it up a million times without success, but after a few weeks I tried again, and for a few days it worked flawlessly, until it finally dropped stone dead. It could also be of interest that I removed the HDD to use as a portable USB-HDD, but the HDD died completely after a few days. But I think it would be able to power up and enter BIOS even without (or with fault) HDD?

Any ideas anyone?

Your problem sounds reminscient of mobo problems with the T20-22. You can search this forum for that. A few of these users were able to get their ThinkPad running again by replacing the CMOS backup battery. However, check the following as well:

Remove the hard drive, optical drive, and battery. Try to boot into the BIOS by pressing F1 at the beginning of the boot sequence. If this works, install the optical drive and try to boot up a bootable CD (you may have to set the CD as bootable in the BIOS). Then try installing the battery and booting the CD again. If all the above works, your hard drive may be failing. If you look at the brand of the hard drive, you may be able to download a hard drive testing tool that you can boot up from a floppy. I know Hitachi and Fujitsu make these tools available for download, and they are free.

Thanks for your reply,
I tried allready to remove-replace the CMOS battery, without success. However my forum search before posting my question seems to have been quite bad...
there's a sticky in the A20/21/22 forums on this issue, that seems quite common to these models: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=10207

Accordning to that guide, after trying to replace CMOS battery the thing to do is reseating CPU, which I will try soon.