Thinkpads Forum

Hi
I cannot access the bios by pressing F1. screen blacks out. The system will boot to operating system(xp pro). Laptop is operating fine. I did a hard drive swap to a bigger drive and tested on pcpitstop . memory was slow compared to old laptop 1/2 the speed. So I tried entering the bios(first time since owning the machine) to check cache and got the blacked out screen. Changed back to old hardrive same problem but the memory speed is back to normal, changed back to new hardrive same problem memory is half speed.

Is the motherboard bad?
Thanks
William

Any Idea why I cant access the bios?

could it be the motherboard?

Can boot to a Linux Live CD?

You may try to press Fn+F7 next time you want to access BIOS if you get a black screen.

it's not a fn/f7 problem, when pressing F1 to access bio the sceen blips like it wants to go into the bios then goes black (screen is not turned off) then nothing , no key pressing will work, Esc doesn't work. I have to power down using the on/off button. turn machine back on and it boots to windows, but I can never access the bios. I have tried many times with same results.

I am sorry to say that from everything you describe the only solution is motherboard replacement. If you still have the factory warranty I would definitely make the call. Curiously though what do you want to change in the BIOS?

Brad

what brought me access the bios was I installed a larger hardrive (320gb) used rescue and recovery to get new drive to factory state, then while doing a pcpitstop test results were memory at half speed and a 25% data fragmentation even after running diskeeper defrag utility, so i thought it may have to do with the write cache not enabled in bios, since I have never accessed bios ever and I am the original owner ,that is probably not the issue.

warranty is out, it lasted 2 years. so I may end up biting the mother board cost.

but what really gets me is I also updated my daughters computer(z60m) installing larger fasted harddrive using same method I did on mine and now hers is having the same results memory at half speed,25% data framentation,half cpu speed although I can access her computers bios.

anything I may be doing wrong?

I copied the partiton from original harddrives onto new one's and used rescue/recovery to get factory state

thanks
william

also when I reinstall the older original harddrives and retest ,memory is back to normal,cpu is back to normal and there is no 25% data fragmentation

What is the current BIOS version (you may get it from system information or CPUZ)?

Maybe it is not a good idea to modify the BIOS of a working system, but have you tried to upgrade the BIOS?

it's version 2.23

You're saying "memory speed", but from the context of your post, I'm thinking you actually mean hard disk speed??

If so, the fact that the original drives bring everything back to normal tells me that you have a setup problem, not a hardware problem.

Make sure that the AHCI/SATA drivers are installed on the new drive/xp....and that the bios is set correctly.

In regards to the CPU-speed changing, it may be that on the 'original' drive and xp-install, Speedstep is either not installed, or disabled, or set to 'max performance'....while on the new drive/xp, it's set to 'power-saving' or 'performance-on-demand'. That latter is the optimal setting, fyi.

good luck with it