T22 woes

[l.butler]

Hi,
I have a T22 that appears to be dying rapidly. The symptoms:

1-The system locked a couple days ago after the screenblanker kicked in. It had
to be powered-off by removing power cable (it runs off mains power without a battery).
There was a scratchy sound, which I have since discovered is produced by the fan.

2-An attempt to boot off the hdd resulted in a lock-up as in 1 during the boot process.

3-Similar experience with booting from a Knoppix LiveCD. The boot process appeared to
have locked during the set up of the X server.

4-Booting from LiveCD to a shell was successful, I mounted the hdd, read system logs
and found nothing edifying. The system again locked up when screensaver kicked on.

5-I removed pcmcia card, minipci card, and hdd. Booted LiveCD and system locked up.

6-I popped in the PCDoctor CD and started running some tests, and system locked during
first quick memory test.

Each lockup, except the last, has been the same: screen is black, all activity lights
are black (except for poweron), and all keyboard input is ignored, including the
power on/off button, and a faint scratchy sound is being made (by the fan, I think).

Any thoughts?

[Harryc]

Could be heat related. Run tpfancontrol in BIOS mode and report CPU temps and fan speed here.
http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~schmitzr/donate.html

[l.butler]

Could be heat related. Run tpfancontrol in BIOS mode and report CPU temps and fan speed here.
http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~schmitzr/donate.html

Is there a bootcd with such a utility on it? At the moment, the only thing that
I can boot is PCDoctor and the Ultimate Boot CD. The latter does not have such
a utility on it, and the Linux kernel it boots does not give me access to acpi
information the way a 2.6.* kernel does.

Anyhow, I removed one of the two RAM sticks and ran memtest+ on it. This froze
after about 20 minutes.

[Harryc]

What OS is loaded on this machine, and does it boot?

[RealBlackStuff]

This all points to a faulty fan and/or worn-out (or lack of) thermal paste between CPU and cooler.
The noisy fan should be replaced and fresh thermal paste (preferably Arctic Silver 5) applied.
You'll need to remove the keyboard, the coverstrip over the hinges, and the palmrest, to get access at the 3 screws that hold the fan in place.

[l.butler]

RBS, thanks for the advice. I removed and re-applied the thermal paste (the fan looked to be in good condition, so I left it). The machine booted up fine after that. Thanks again, Leo.