T23 wont boot- hard drive clicks - no hard drive visible in

[guitarsjm]

ug!!
ok before i lose my mind, for being a techie computer network geek who stupidly didnt back up the HD in time.. anyway

t23... first problem started... battery wasnt charging, alright, thought it was old, had nothing to shove it in, got another one, drained and kaput, no charge.... tried other power supply,no go

next (should've seen it coming but had so much work to do!!)started getting infrequent 'poof' windows BSD's

would reboot manually or restart on its own (still dumb [censored] me did not back up data yet..HAD TO FINISH THE WORK!)

final 'poof'... get up in morning, grab laptop, notice screen has a weird blak and white like mosaic pattern across bottom...

ok.. hit the power button, it shuts off, i hit power button.... all i get..rather hear, is a clicking from the hd, an ibm emergency boot message that there is no os, blablabla...

i reboot go to bios, i see NO setting or anything that relates to hard drives or hd settings/detection etc. IS there any on this system? i'm really used to desktop and dell notebooks... i've heard lots about ibm/lenovo's weird/whacky bios...

anyway... seeing nothing in bios, i've reset and reset... hd just clicks

i am thinking the mobo has gone, since system wont charge anymore, and maybe problem had progressed further to the point of not being able to detect hard drives(?)... i just bought another t23 since it was really so [censored] good and reliable... hoping that if it WAS a mobo/bios problem, that i could just slip the old drive into the newer t23, etc.... any clues?? is there or are there bios settings for the hard drive / hd detecting?? appreciate all!!

you can email me at either

here at the thinkpad forums or

guitarsjm@msn.com

or

john_martini2002@yahoo.com

thank you

[tfflivemb2]

It sounds like you have two problems that occurred rather coincidentally. The not charging problem appears to be a systemboard problem. The hard drive problem just sounds like the hard drive died, which happens.

Ray Kawakami (rkawakami) has a link on here somewhere for PC Doctor, in a bootable CD version. I would recommend trying to use that to test the system. Also, I would recommend Ultimate Boot CD, where you can downloaded an image to create a bootable disk, which has TONS of utilities including the Hitachi/IBM hard drive fitness test. I would see if it recognizes the hard drive, and then run the "advanced" test on it.

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinkpads.com (wish it was under better circumstances)!

t23... first problem started... battery wasnt charging, alright, thought it was old, had nothing to shove it in, got another one, drained and kaput, no charge.... tried other power supply,no go

Like tfflivemb2 said, that could be indicative of a motherboard problem with the battery charging chip (an Analog Devices one I believe).

would reboot manually or restart on its own

Could be a number of things: memory, power, motherboard.

notice screen has a weird blak and white like mosaic pattern across bottom...

Only seen that on broken LCD panels.

i reboot go to bios, i see NO setting or anything that relates to hard drives or hd settings/detection etc. IS there any on this system?

No. There's nothing like that in the T23 BIOS. About the only thing that might be like restoring hard drive parameters is the Load Defaults command.

Generally, if you are having problems booting the system, the standard operating procedure is to remove all of the stuff that's easily removable. This would be: memory, hard drive, PCMCIA, USB, Ultrabay, MiniPCI, ethernet. For your problem, since it seems like the only problem is "seeing" the hard drive, try this: take the MiniPCI card out of the system. Located underneath the panel to the left of the IBM label on the bottom of the system, it's the larger card being held in with two metal arms on either end. Pop it out like a memory module and try to start the system again (with the hard drive in). If that works, you've found the problem. If not, then removing those other items probably will not help.

I have hosted a copy of an .ISO file which contains the IBM-supplied PC Doctor program. Somebody had previously found it at another site but that link has gone dead, so I decided to put it on mine. You can get it here:

http://www.kawakami-ca.com/ibm_t2x/ibm_t22_pcdiag.iso

Don't worry about the name of the file ("t22"). The program works for all T2x systems. Download the .ISO, use the program of your choice to burn the image onto a CD and then boot the system off of the CD. Press the "any" key a couple of times when prompted to load the next "floppy" and that should get you into the diagnostics. It takes a few seconds to "read" the hardware. Once it's ready you can begin to select tests to run under the Diagnostic heading. There's stuff for the CPU, system board, hard drive, ports, memory and others.