T60 sudden death?

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RaviN · #1 Post by **RaviN** » Wed May 21, 2008 11:43 pm

I left my T60 lid down, unplugged, and I thought in Sleep Mode when I left for work. Came home and it won't wake up. It seems very very dead. I did the long on/off switch push, removed and replaced the battery, and a few FN key sequences but to no avail.

The green battery LED indicates a good charge and the Green power LED is on. When I take the battery out and put it back in, pressing the on/off switch causes the battery LED to blink for a second and that's all the response I can get.

Any ideas? I'm getting the sinking feeling that something is seriously wrong.

#2 Post by **gator** » Wed May 21, 2008 11:56 pm

Remove RAM/HDD/mini-pcie wireless/ultrabay device/battery and boot with AC adapter. You should get the familiar 1-3-3-1 no RAM beep first. Once that happens, put a single stick of RAM and booting again, you should be able to go into the BIOS. If that happens, your mobo is probably OK. You can put the rest one by one later and see at what stage your machine fails to boot (if it boots at all with a stick of RAM).

I'd also suggest removing the CMOS battery, wait for 2 mins, put it back and see if everything is OK. Let us know what happens with these and we can take it from there.

and btw, is your machine under warranty? I remember you saying something about heat issues in some other thread, that might be something to look at too.

RaviN · #3 Post by **RaviN** » Thu May 22, 2008 12:50 am

Thanks for the fast response. Here's the story so far:

1) The temperature of the system this morning before I went away was quite low. CPU ~48C or thereabouts

2) I've had the system for ~16 months and I didn't buy an extended warranty. Lenovo sent me a replacement palmrest a couple of months ago at no charge so I am thinking I may be under some parts coverage but I strongly doubt I have any repair claim

With the main battery out:

3) Taking out the CMOS battery for several minutes did not change the situation

4) I pulled out the HD, wireless, Ultrabay CD ROM, and the two RAM modules. I hooked up the keyboard and held it up to clear the dangling wireless adapter cables. I left the palmrest off. Hooking up AC power (no main battery) gives a green power LED indicator on the lights near the screen. Pushing the power button does nothing. No sound, no blinking lights, or any other indication of activity

#4 Post by **gator** » Thu May 22, 2008 1:19 am

Look at page 54 of the HMM available here:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 62733.html

If you are getting no beep codes with all removable devices removed, it appears that there might be an issue with the motherboard ... look up your warranty here:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... -WARNTY#sw

If you have warranty, contact Lenovo and see what your options are ...

Another thing to check would be to make sure that your AC adapter is working properly. If you have a multimeter check the voltage output. It might be that your machine ran out of battery and the AC adapter is not giving enough voltage to power the system ... on a related note, the part of your mobo that regulates the power might be gone too. If you are out of warranty, contact forum member jamiphar and ask if he can take a look at your system.

RaviN · #5 Post by **RaviN** » Thu May 22, 2008 1:28 am

Thanks. I get no response at all - no beeps or anything - so I think the motherboard may be at issue.

I just got off the phone with Lenovo and apparently the unit is still under warranty. I also checked the link you sent and I am ok until 2010 sometime. I will ask them to send a box to get it to the dept per their offer.

My only worry is the Hard Disk. Any way to get my data off of it before it goes in? Last backup was a couple of weeks ago.

#6 Post by **gator** » Thu May 22, 2008 1:40 am

You dont have to send your hard disk or RAM for the repair, or for that matter your ul;trabay device. Infact I strongly suggest you keep them.

RaviN · #7 Post by **RaviN** » Thu May 22, 2008 1:59 am

The box from Lenovo is on its way and I've alerted them that I'll be keeping the hard disk with me. They also said that they would not need the Ultrabay CD/DVD unit.

While the unit is in service, is there any way I can backup the hard drive or at least the directory with my mail folders? I am typing this on my old Sony Vaio notebook. It has USB 1.1 and I have an external Maxtor HD that I've been using to backup the T60.

Thanks again for the help, especially considering the time zone you're in!

#8 Post by **gator** » Thu May 22, 2008 2:13 am

Glad to be of help, I stay up late in the night anyway

You can ofcourse put your T60 HDD in a SATA enclosure if you have one and take backups of whatever folders you want, but AFAIK most external HDDs are PATA, though SATA ones are gaining base slowly. If you haven't done this kind of a backup before it is best to just let things the way they are ...

The best stragetgy for backups is to use a ultrabay HDD caddy and maintain a full clone (using acronis or norton ghost) at a good frequency ... ofcourse this will keep erasing and rewriting your clone HDD. A good midway solution would be to get a full 'starter' clone and do an incremental backup using a shell script (like what apple does with their time machine s/w). Just do a forum search, plenty of people have posted what they do for backups.

RaviN · #9 Post by **RaviN** » Thu May 22, 2008 2:36 am

gator wrote:Glad to be of help, I stay up late in the night anyway

I've been Internet active since the early 1980s and I'm still blown away by this kind of realtime problem solving!

gator wrote: You can ofcourse put your T60 HDD in a SATA enclosure if you have one and take backups of whatever folders you want, but AFAIK most external HDDs are PATA, though SATA ones are gaining base slowly. If you haven't done this kind of a backup before it is best to just let things the way they are ...

Whoa... I just searched on Sata Drive and found this general product:
http://www.satadrives.com/nasadrenwius.html

If I've got this right, for $30, I can put my T60 HDD in one of these things, hook it up to my backup notebook's USB port, connect my external Maxtor drive on the same notebook and move the critical folders over using copy?!

If so, I'll sleep very well tonight.

Final question for now: When I put the T60 HDD back into the T60, there wasn't a clear tactile/audible indication that it had seated. I know I had it oriented correctly. Is this normal?

#10 Post by **gator** » Thu May 22, 2008 2:50 am

1. The link you posted is for a 3.5" desktop HDD, so it won't work. You need something like this:
http://www.cooldrives.com/almiposa25in.html
Much more options here, but be warned, they are not cheap.
http://www.cooldrives.com/25usbfircas.html

Once again, if any of your friends/coworkers has a T6x/R6x machine and an ultrabay HDD sata adapter for the T6x series, it'll be much much easier to backup.

2. Yes, once you get a proper enlcosure and attach the HDD, you can connect it to any computer that has USB (preferably 2, 1.1 will be painfully slow) and back up whatever you want. Make sure that you don't accidentally delete the recovery partition or modify the MBR etc, then you won't be able to boot from this machine when you put it back in your T60.

3. There is only one way the SATA HDD can attach to the T60 motherboard, so if the HDD caddy went all the way in, you are fine

RaviN · #11 Post by **RaviN** » Thu May 22, 2008 3:12 am

None of my colleagues have Thinkpads so I will go with the 2.5" adapter.

This store is near where I live and they offer:
http://shop3.frys.com/product/4079702

I'll look into a ghosting solution for the longer term. I have been using xcopy to backup the T60's non system files and that has worked for the most part.

#12 Post by **gator** » Thu May 22, 2008 3:18 am

The Fry's link you posted is for 2.5" PATA drives

Make sure you get the right one!

RaviN · #13 Post by **RaviN** » Thu May 22, 2008 7:57 am

Yikes. I couldn't tell from the description.

How about this one:
http://shop3.frys.com/product/5028505

#14 Post by **gator** » Thu May 22, 2008 12:46 pm

RaviN wrote:Yikes. I couldn't tell from the description.

How about this one:
http://shop3.frys.com/product/5028505

That should work.

RaviN · #15 Post by **RaviN** » Fri May 23, 2008 1:13 pm

I bought a drive adapter, xcopied critical files, and the notebook is on its way to the depot. I am hopeful that they can fix it and within the terms of the warranty.

Before I bought the T60 I looked carefully into all the options for CPUs, cache, and RAM. With this event, I learned how little that mattered in actual use relative to the ability to access and preserve the data on the drive. One major bullet dodged - Viva Forum!

#16 Post by **gator** » Fri May 23, 2008 2:51 pm

RaviN wrote:Before I bought the T60 I looked carefully into all the options for CPUs, cache, and RAM. With this event, I learned how little that mattered in actual use relative to the ability to access and preserve the data on the drive.

Amen! Most new buyers tend to ovdrlook this fact (including me) ...

RaviN · #17 Post by **RaviN** » Thu May 29, 2008 11:04 pm

Followup:

My T60 reached the depot the Tuesday after Memorial Day. Depot shipped it back Wednesday evening and I got it on Thursday night from DHL.

They replaced a system board, CPU, fan, flashed a new BIOS onto it, reseated and realigned the keybord bezel, and ran PC Doctor on it.

After reinstalling the hard drive, the first couple of boots/logins resulted in some Memory Parity error and entertaining screens of death. I tried a safe mode reboot and realized I had forgotten my password after months of fingerprint reader use. Major fail, as the young people say.

Fortunately, just trying safe mode helped. The next two boot/logins worked and I am back working with the unit. I've written down the login password in case of future emergency.

I am of course impressed with the Depot. The lag in the process was getting the unit to them and the long weekend drove that. A 1.5 day turnaround including a system retest prior to shipment is admirable for a system that is nearly 18 months old. I was fully expecting it to be out of warranty but it was repaired at no cost. My lingering concern is that there is no root cause. No knock on the service organization - if you want fast turnaround, you can't test forever.

In this thread, I wondered about operating temperatures:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=

I'm running the CPU hungry Spybot as I type this, using NHC's dynamic CPU speed mode. The CPU is at 2GHz and the temperature started at 41C and is now at a cool 52C with 75% of the scan done. It used to be 25C or more higher at equivalent points prior to the failure and repair. I have to believe that something was amiss with the cooling system and it all of a sudden went crispy critters. Trouble is I don't know if I screwed up when I attempted to clean the dust or if the high temperatures were a sign of something else having gone wrong. Since cleaning the dust is a good thing to do, I'm at a loss of how to do it better the next time.

#18 Post by **gator** » Fri May 30, 2008 1:05 am

It was probably a cooling system (fan) failure, or a motherboard issue. Cleaning the dust is always a good idea, just make sure that you don't directly blow onto the fan from a close distance; if you use a can of compressed air, blow from the intake side (back vents) gently and in short bursts, taking care not to blow the dust to other areas.

Your machine has enough warranty, so you have nothing to worry

T60 sudden death?

T60 sudden death?

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