^ Pulsating fan fixed, caused BIOS problem?!?

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80211mdr · #1 Post by **80211mdr** » Sun Dec 30, 2007 7:31 pm

Hello I just fixed the "pulsating fan" problem on my t23 by resoldering that inductor that seems to commonly fall off on the back of the motherboard. However when I booted the machine back up i was greeted with a very perplexing problem. The machine gave me an error 0271 (system clock not set) which I expected. I went into the BIOS to reset the time and was frustrated to discover that I cannot enter any of the menus in the BIOS! Basically I can only navigate up and down with the arrow keys, view the help file with F1, and use the pageup/pagedown keys. Clicking enter does nothing (it should open a sub-menu) clicking F5 (change value), F9 (default settings), and F10 (save & exit) all do nothing! Before i soldered the inductor I used the BIOS and everything worked fine. Any ideas on what is causing this weird BIOS issue? I cant do anything until the clock is set

#2 Post by **rkawakami** » Sun Dec 30, 2007 7:38 pm

Welcome to thinkpads.com!

Can't say I have ever seen this type of problem, but if you had a pulsing fan issue then that should have prevented you from even entering BIOS. The keyboard problem might be from not seating the connector all of the way. With the system off, press the "Y" key and the area surrounding it to make sure the keyboard connector is firmly seated. Power up again and see if that helped.

80211mdr · #3 Post by **80211mdr** » Sun Dec 30, 2007 7:55 pm

Thank for the quick reply! I tried re-seating the keyboard, no luck

. I might swing by a friends house tomorrow and try using a keyboard connected to his dock to set the clock in the BIOS. That should rule out the possibility of a faulty keyboard. The whole issue seems sort of fishy. They only keys that have _no_ response are the keys that actually _do_ something useful in the BIOS. All the non used keys make a beep when pressed. This leads me to believe that this issue is deeper than a malfunctioning keyboard. What I cant figure out is why the BIOS would half-work if something inside was damaged by me when I opened it up. I would think it would ether be broken or fixed

80211mdr · #4 Post by **80211mdr** » Sun Dec 30, 2007 8:38 pm

Here's a vid. Hope it clarifies the issue a bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgBLfBVTTAo

#5 Post by **rkawakami** » Sun Dec 30, 2007 9:40 pm

Nice and clear video to explain the problem

!

I've been playing around with a T23 to try to duplicate the problem by holding down a couple of the keys (CTRL, ALT, Fn) but I either get a "stuck key" error or ALL of the keys don't work right. About the only other thing I can suggest is to pull the CMOS battery out for a minute, re-install it and try again. I'm assuming that you don't have a supervisor (BIOS) password set but if you do, that will trigger it and you will need to enter the password to access the BIOS.

80211mdr · #6 Post by **80211mdr** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 4:21 pm

Problem solved!

Strangely it worked fine with an external keyboard through a dock. I guess I must have somehow damaged the keyboard when I took it off

Looks like i'm in the market for a new keyboard.

Quite a coincidence though that only the keys that do something in the BIOS are broken

goofyGAguy · #7 Post by **goofyGAguy** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 9:26 pm

^ Pulsating fan fixed, caused BIOS problem?!?

^ Pulsating fan fixed, caused BIOS problem?!?

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