T22 Intermittent boot failure/Windows load freeze

[clayts]

Evenin' all.

I have a lovely T22 (£150 off ebay a while back) but it has just started with an annoying and frustrating fault.

I have it as a dual boot Windows 98SE (with unofficial service pack)/Ubuntu machine. Either one of the following three will occur when I press the power button :

(i) IBM Thinkpad logo appears on screen, but that's yer lot - hard drive light goes out. Tried pressing space bar, but no dice. Only option - switch off and try again

(ii) IBM Thinkpad logo appears on screen, goes to Grub loader, select Windows 98SE..... then Windows 98SE splashscreen comes up...and freezes. Hard drive light goes out. Only way out - remove AC adapter, remove battery.

(iii) no problem boot up - increasingly rare

In all cases, I have both an AC adapter and a battery in. Not sure whether this is classified as a 'blink of death' error ? The only change I have made to the machine in the last few days is to load Trillian. I find it odd that one program could make such a difference.

Anyone have any clues ?

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinkpads.com!

Answering the last question first, the "blink of death" is when the laptop flashes the hard drive LED once, very briefly, when the power button is pushed. No other signs of life are detectable; no IBM splash screen, no beeps, no boot, nothing.

The current problem you are having could be a bad disk drive or something on the motherboard. As an experiment, pull the MiniPCI modem card out and see if that helps with booting. That card can cause boot and OS installation problems when it goes bad. If pulling the modem card does not help, then I'd say your next step is to see if you can try another disk drive OR run some diagnostics on it. Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test or PC Doctor can be used to see if the drive is working properly. If that appears normal, then that might point to the motherboard as the source of the problem. I have seen a T23 "lock-up" because of a bad solder connection on a crystal.

[clayts]

Cheers - I'll have a play. I have a wireless miniPC card, so I'll try pulling that first. Odd that it's never happened before, though, so it sounds as if it's the system board or hard disc drive failing.

Don't have access to a spare disc drive, unfortunately, but I'll give those diagnostic tools a whirl, first. Is it worth doing memtest86 too ?

[rkawakami]

Running a memory diagnostic certainly wouldn't hurt, but from the descriptions it sounds more like a hard drive or motherboard issue. For the T23 system which exhibited the same type of problem I found that flexing the front left corner of the system allowed it to boot and operate normally as long as I applied upward pressure on the bottom (just between the hard drive and PCMCIA cage) and downward pressure at the front, top left corner. In other words, with the left hand fingertips under the system and the left thumb on the top corner, push up with the fingers and down with the thumb. This flexed the motherboard enough to allow the broken solder joint to make contact with the crystal. It was also detectable when running one of the PC Doctor diagnostics (real-time clock) in a loop. The system would fail if left alone but pass as long as I applied the previous mentioned pressure on the left corner. Of course I had to hold the system like that while it finished booting and loading PC Doctor.