T41 Fails Bios Menu on Startup

[bustedup]

I have a T41 that seems to have died. Initially, on startup (power off to power on) it would throw up the initial "splashscreen" (Thinkpad w/ centrino logo in upper-right hand corner) then the screen would go dark. It seemed to load, however, as the HD light showed the HD being accessed. Finally it would turn on the Wi-Fi radio and I could see that flickering. OS: Ubuntu v8.x, 512MB RAM, 1.6GHz Centrino.

I attempted to enter the Bios menu on startup by holding down the Enter key on startup. However, once I entered the menu as soon as I pushed the down arrow key, the screen went dark. I tried this multiple times, but the Bios menu would only come up intermittently. Most of the time, the machine screen would go dark, the fan would be running and the HD would be quiet.

I then tried booting from Ubuntu on CDROM. The machine read the CD-ROM, took me through the first menu selection - English as the language - then the screen went black, as before, and nothing happened.

Next I downloaded the CD-ROM image of PC-Doctor from the lenovo website (PCDD1751.iso) and tried running that, but just got a black screen.

I suspect that the BIOS is toast, and the machine is unable to boot reliably, although I don't know what else I could do to really confirm that for sure. I'm wondering if this is a candidate for replacing the motherboard - any ideas?

Thanks ahead of time for any input on this one!

Oh, one other detail: I also tried connecting the VGA output to an external monitor, just to make sure that this wasn't a video problem, but got nothing coming out of the VGA monitor, so I don't think it's just a bad inverter, or something like that.

[BillMorrow]

I attempted to enter the Bios menu on startup by holding down the Enter key on startup.

enter key..!

has something changed since i last booted into the bios on a thionkpad..?
it should be F1 key while in the splash screen to enter the bios..

the blue thinkpad key to get to the pre-desktop (aka recovery) partition..
i'm not sure WHAT pressing the enter key during the splash screen will do..

[bustedup]

Hmm. Good point. I tried both the blue thinkpad button, as well as the Enter button, and it's possible that the Enter button didn't actually do anything. However, when pushing the thinkpad button (when the screen didn't go black) it would bring up a menu containing F1 as an option to view the Bios menu. After pushing F1, I got the Bios info such as Bios version, date, CPU version, CPU speed, Memory, etc. It was at this point, that pushing the down arrow button, I'd lose the Bios info screen and get a black screen.

[BillMorrow]

these things change over time..
in the T41 the blue buttom MIGHT take you to a menu.. i juust don't recall..
but in recent thinkpads it takes you to the revocery partition (if it exists on the HDD)..

just press F1 in the splash screen..

and when you press down arrow do it lightly..
it could be that if you stab the down arrow the keyboard flexes a tiny bit and disturbs the GPU in some silly esoteric way.. or not.. i don't know i'm just grabbing at straws here..

it seems to me that if the bios was trashed you would not be getting anywhere at all..
the fact you can see the bios means its more or less there..