T40 screen lights up but never gets to splash screen/BIOS

[ajkula66]

A pretty weird one, and my bag of tricks got me nowhere...

The machine (2373-75U) powers on, fan, hard and media drives are running, LCD lights up but the IBM splash screen never appears.

I've tried discharging, running with no battery/drives, docked/undocked, swapping RAM, keyboard...pretty much anything I could think of, but got the same result over and over.

Pressing on the GPU gets me nowhere.

The board does give proper beep sequence with the RAM removed.

I'm half a step away from parting it out, but am more than willing to try any suggestions that might come up. It's a reasonably pretty ThinkPad...

I don't have an external monitor to test with, but will try a different LCD later on tonight.

Your thoughts?

[RealBlackStuff]

This may be related (or not at all in your case), poshgeordie stumbled upon this:
on the underside of the mobo, near the fan cutout, U25 solder joints go open circuit.
To check, set the mobo up vertically and the laptop starts up when you press on U25.
BTW it's a small power mosfet in the supply line.

Another trick to try: press/hold the Fn key down and then hit the Power button.
As soon as the laptop turns on, release Fn.
When IBM/Lenovo splash image appears (before POST), quickly press Esc 2-3 times. If you miss this image (only on for 1-2 seconds), do it again.
In your case, try and do it 'blind', i.e. pretend you see this image, you never know...

[poshgeordie]

I'm not sure when it comes into play, but also try pressing down on the Southbridge chip - the square chip located under the Palmrest and then under the wireless card at centre front of the motherboard.

The easiest way with U25 and the Fn key tests is to connect the board to an ext monitor. Also if none of these suggestions work try pressing on the board in different places - same idea as the U25 thing!

[ajkula66]

I have pressed on the Southbridge and that got me nowhere as well...

That small screwdriver set is starting to look more and more appetizing...

[motacoelho]

I bought a used t43 last month and I'm feeling concerned with a large pink area on the LCD lower right side.

1. When I boot the laptop, the image IBM is there, perfect, without pink color.
2. following this, the Image "Windows rebooting", the same, no pink.
3. Arrived to the desktop and using Firefox, the pink area is there;
4. I made a DOS PC-Doctor on a boot able CD, I run all testes. Everything good.

I'm bad.
Whats wrong with the laptop? Help needed. Thank you.

[Harryc]

@motacoelho, please start your own thread.