Thinkpads Forum

I have a T61 that was running perfectly. The next day it wont boot no bios or thinkpad splash screens. I get one set of four beeps and no matter how long I wait there are no more beeps. I have read about 4 cycles of 4 beeps but I only get 1 cycle. Does anyone have any idea as to what can be wrong with my thinkpad.

Thank you in advance.

Might be a system board. Have a look at the link below.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6012276/Hardw ... en#page=50

I'd remove the ram and see if the beeps change, then install a known good ram chip in each of the sockets one at a time and see if there is any change. If you don't have a known good chip, but had two chips installed, try one of them in each slot, then the other. If you need a chip to test with, I have some 1gb chips that are very cheap or I might have a 512mb chip I could send you to test with.

You can also try removing as much hardware as possible, drives, cards, modem, just strip it all out and see if you still get the beeps, if you do, AND your ram is good, then your system board probably isn't.

Good Luck

Something that happened to one of my X60 systems: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=90116

Short version: Had same single cycle of four beeps. Removed the two 1GB modules and installed a 512MB module. System booted with configuration error message, went into BIOS and re-loaded defaults. Re-installed original 2GB of memory and system was back to normal. My only thought is that this was some sort of CMOS memory glitch. If you don't have any spare DDR2 memory modules, you might be able to reset the system by removing AC adapter and battery, pulling the CMOS battery, waiting about a minute and then re-installing it. A word of warning: if your system has a BIOS (supervisor) password set, the system will ask for it when it's re-booted. If you don't know it, then you will have essentially turned the T61 into a doorstop.

Thanks for all the advice. I took out the ram and put in ram from a different system. The laptop booted right up. I put the ram back in and got the beeps again. I figured out that the bottom memory slot would give error whenever any ram was plugged in. The upper ram slot worked with all the ram.

I am glad I got this fixed. I just have an error now that the ram needs to be in the bottom slot and I have to push escape to continue. Is there anyway to by pass this error.

I'm not sure of what error message you are getting with respect to "ram needs to be in the bottom slot". My suggestion, if you haven't already tried it, is to re-load the BIOS defaults and see if that helps.