T61 Crashing: Running out of troubleshooting options.
Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2025 11:17 am
Hey so I'm trying to restore back to life an old T61 (You'll find the specs here: https://pastebin.com/ChMDV7vf), first things I did was swapping the HDD for an SSD, change the thermal paste and gave it a thorough airdust.
The machine runs okay but it's crashing unpredictably every couple of hours, I'll leave it playing a youtube stream for a couple hours and it will suddenly crash, no correlation to me doing anything. When it crashes the screens freezes, mouse too, Num Lock works but Caps lock and SysRq + R E I S U B doesn't, sound does not work either, I can see activity on the WiFi but not on disk. Only forcing a shutdown and rebooting brings it back.
What I've tried (to no avail):
The machine runs okay but it's crashing unpredictably every couple of hours, I'll leave it playing a youtube stream for a couple hours and it will suddenly crash, no correlation to me doing anything. When it crashes the screens freezes, mouse too, Num Lock works but Caps lock and SysRq + R E I S U B doesn't, sound does not work either, I can see activity on the WiFi but not on disk. Only forcing a shutdown and rebooting brings it back.
What I've tried (to no avail):
- Install different OS like XP, Ubuntu and Mint, every single one crashed
- Look up it's GPU, it's an Intel Core2 Duo T7100, not the infamous early NVIDIA models that would crash
- Tested SSD and RAM memory health from BIOS but all tests passed
- Monitored temperature, no overheating
- Using stress-ng I stress tested the GPU, RAM, SSD, WiFi and CPU independently in an attempt to reproduce the crash and thus narrow down the error to a particular component, I could not reproduce it
- Looking at error logs in Linux at the time of the crash (you can find some of the error logs here: https://pastebin.com/4ga3LqJt and here: https://pastebin.com/LEYXK3KG)
- In the error logs I found some references to WiFi drivers iwlegacy and iwl4965 so I disabled both of them, and tested it with Ethernet connection, it still crashed
- I even went as far as to remove the Intel 4965AGN WiFi card as suggested here in some old posts, plug a WFi dongle, donwload it's drivers and test it but it also crashed... (side note this is why it's not listed on the specs)