Thinkpads Forum

A friend of mine gave me his T60 (1951-01U) which was giving him a number of problems, the most serious of which was that it wouldn't go into standby when the cover was closed but would just shut down and then occasionally beep.

Of course I first checked for the usual suspects and the system is clean of any virus / spyware / adware (no root kits or anything detected).

I tried to run the system update utility and it gave an error to which I found a solution to (an edit to the registry fixed it) and there were no less than 40 updates. All various system software including, power management, bios, video, hard drive firmware, etc... it was quite a list. After I installed all of those updates and rebooted standby and suspend both seem to work. However now the system has the proverbial Windows XP reboots on shutdown issue. When I user either the power button (to initiate) or click start / shutdown / shutdown then system shuts down the screen and all lights go dark for about 3 to 5 seconds and then the system starts up again.

There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of Google references to this problem but many of them are not applicable do to the fact that the ThinkPad uses it's own power management software. So far these are some of the things I've checked:

By default XP executes a restart in the event of a system failure, I've upchecked the "Automatically Restart" option in Startup and Recovery and I don't see any blue screen or other problem when shutting down... it just restarts.

One person mentioned that in the bios, making sure that all pci interrupts were set to automatic fixed his problem. On this system they were all set to IRQ 11 and switching them to automatic did not fix the problem.

This system does not use Roxio Easy CD creator / DirectCD so I doubt that's the problem.

No connected USB or other devices (that I can tell) that are waking the computer up i.e. wake on lan etc.

There were some suggestions that problem hardware such as CD or DVD drives could cause this but I stopped and removed the internal DVD drive and still had the problem.

These are just some of the things I've tried with no luck, does anyone have any suggestions or knowledge about this problem?

Thanks,

- Norm

I've never come across this problem, but then again I hardly ever power down. Why don't you use hibernate instead of powering down?

Well the standby problem that he gave it to me to fix has in fact been fixed but I really hate to give it back to him with a problem that it didn't have when he gave it to me.

Also I need to take back one thing I indicated previously, the hibernate problem does still exist. When I now try Shutdown / Hibernate windows says that it's hibernating but in fact does a restart, pretty much what happens when I try and shutdown.

He said that he does like to use standby but for those instances when he does want to shutdown I'm sure that he'd like that to work.

- Norm

Did you check the event log?

Yes, I did check the event log and there are no errors or warning messages in either the system or application logs.

Wrt. the hibernation problem:
when the computer restarts, does it actually create/use the hibernation file or does it just go through a warm start? The latter would indicate that the hibernation file is corrupt. Deleting it, followed by recreating it might fix it.
Otherwise, it might be a hardware problem (as the power switch on the motherboard apparently either does not get the power down command or does not correctly process it) <- this is me just guessing as I'm not a hardware guy and as previously stated I've no personal experience with this problem.

When I use shutdown / hibernate the system says Hibernating then shuts down then in 3 - 5 seconds restarts saying "Resuming Windows" so I take that to mean that it's using the hibernation file.

Fyi, I tried starting in safe mode to check a few things when I tried to shut it down it did the same thing.. it just restarted.

When it restarts and I get the Lenovo logo / post screen I am able to force it off by holding the power button down.

Unfortunately I did have to give it back to my friend since he was lost without his system but at least he can suspend and if necessary force it off in the same manner I did. But if anyone has any other suggestions I can always go over and take a look at it.