Thinkpads Forum

Very odd problem. Extremely intermittently (like every 5th boot.... maybe less), the Win7 boot animation stalls and the machine becomes unresponsive. Pressing and holding the power button turns it off and it will restart but the boot animation will again freeze. Occasionally it will simply boot successfully after a couple tries but usually once this happens, I need to remove the power and battery to get it to boot again. Windows startup repair reports that it can't fix it but does not provide any clue as to what the problem is. The last time, even removing the battery didn't restore it and I went into BIOS and reverted to default settings, which restored it. I don't think I loaded default settings after installing Middleton BIOS so maybe something was mis-configured?

Note that I don't boot very often, so we are talking weeks between episodes. Once "fixed" it will boot repeatedly without issues.

After reverting to default BIOS settings, it now boots normally again but it makes a little audible "pip" when sleeping or waking from sleep. Don't ever recall that happening as long as I have owned it and I don't recall seeing anything in the BIOS that would control it? I'll try going back to the non-Middleton BIOS and see if anything changes. Is the "pip" perhaps an aborted beep?

When I first installed Win7 about four years ago, it did the same thing for a while. I seem to recall thinking it might have been trying to load a CDROM driver during boot because Win7 was installed while it was docked but it normally runs without a CDROM drive. I forget how it resolved but it never happened again until recently.

One more clue..... it will not shut down if I have a thumb drive plugged in. I'm pretty sure this is new, and it is a Windows think as far as I can tell, not a BIOS thing. I have Linux Mint on a thumb drive. If I plug the thumb drive in a tell the machine to reboot, the shutdown process stalls until I remove the drive. If I am running Linux from the thumb drive and tell Linux to shut down, it shuts down successfully. I am near certain that this is a new symptom that started at about the same time as the boot freeze.

Anyone have any insight?

Paul

What SSD are we discusssing here to begin with?

Sorry.... it is the Samsung EVO 840 250GB. I'm not at all sure the SSD is the culprit.... it begins to boot just fine, just stalls part way through at the exact same point each time. A checkdisk shows no errors.

Paul

The culprit is almost certainly the SSD, especially if it is one of the first 840 EVO ones.
Samsung 840 EVO uses the cheapest of the cheap, namely TLC NANDs, which don't exactly have a good reputation.
If it faults at the same spot, some RAM is 'stuck' somewhere.
Maybe TRIM can solve some of it?

Replacing Middleton's BIOS will make your laptop even more slow, not a good idea...

There's a load of threads on Lenovo Forums about ThinkPads not playing well with newer Samsung SSDs...so that's another reason that I'd tend to believe that the SSD is indeed the culprit. So while the drive itself might be healthy, there's still no guarantee that it will perform well.

As for the EVOs...duh. I'm not keen on them what-so-ever.

Personally, I'd try another SSD.

On another note: what if any tweaks have you performed on the drive itself?

So the fact that it did this same thing when I first installed Win7 back in the rotating hard drive days is a coincidence? And fixing it by removing power and/or resetting BIOS is also a coincidence (that one I can partially believe)?

Dang, I thought the Samsung drives were pretty good.

I have not performed any tweeks beyond whatever the Samsung utility did when I installed it. I have indexing and super fetch disabled in Windows. I have 4GB RAM and used to have the swap file turned off but it would occasionally complain about running low on memory so I enabled a small swap file. The system rung fabulous other than this issue and the HD light is usually completely off when idle.

I think I'll image my system back to the original hard drive just in case and then see what happens going forward.

Paul

Have you overprovisioned the drive? If not, that's the first thing you should do IMO.

OP is an absolute must on a vast majority of "modern" SSDs, and EVOs take the cake in misbehaving when not OP'd...

Yes, I have about 40gb uncommittef.

Paul

Sounds like a defective drive. You could try the drive in a different computer to see if you get the same problem, though. I have an samsung 840 pro ssd, and it has worked flawlessly in my W530 and T61 for almost 2 years, but I might have just been lucky to get a good drive.

Pro and EVO are two quite different birds, actually...

With three X61s and two tablets, all running the Middleton BIOS, I have never seen this.

However, I have seen something very similar with an HP DV5z, and the cause appears to be electrical noise that exceeds the noise margin on startup.

The problem was resolved by changing the wireless card to another type. This does not mean that the wireless card was bad. It is just a curious interaction of the noise generation and absorption characteristics of the various components.

You might have a bad bypass capacitor. Unfortunately, they are scattered all over the board. In the old days, when tantalums were used, a cap would burn to a cinder, which was easily recognizable. I don't know how they look these days.

Interesting reading. I have imaged my SSD back to the original HD as a ready to go backup (I also do regular backups) and will continue to run the SSD after resetting the BIOS to see if the problem persists.

Note that when it fails, it ALWAYS fails at the exact same point in the boot process, so I doubt this is random noise. It COULD be a stuck cell, I guess.

Any comments on the little "pip" the MB makes as it suspends or resumes? This began after I reset the Middleton BIOS to defaults. Never did it until that point and I have owned the laptop for about 5 years and several BIOS revisions. It does it with both the SSD or the HD installed.

Paul

If you are talking about a very short beep sound on suspend and resume, yes it should be normal. It happens on all the t60s and t61s I have used as well.

brchan wrote:If you are talking about a very short beep sound on suspend and resume, yes it should be normal. It happens on all the t60s and t61s I have used as well.

Well, good to hear that it is normal. Not sure why it has never happened until now though

Paul

One reason you may have not heard it before was if sound was muted, or the beep was disabled in the OS. I have noticed this in some Linux distributions, and there are settings to disable or enable beep, and I assume something similar probably exists in Windows. Anyway, the beep is probably there to tell you for sure that your computer has actually suspended. Imagine closing the lid, assuming the laptop suspended but did not (and you did not look at the suspend status light), and putting the laptop into your backpack for a few hours (overheating)!

brchan wrote:One reason you may have not heard it before was if sound was muted, or the beep was disabled in the OS. I have noticed this in some Linux distributions, and there are settings to disable or enable beep, and I assume something similar probably exists in Windows. Anyway, the beep is probably there to tell you for sure that your computer has actually suspended. Imagine closing the lid, assuming the laptop suspended but did not (and you did not look at the suspend status light), and putting the laptop into your backpack for a few hours (overheating)!

Hmmm.... it looks like it is a Windows thing. My sound is often muted within Windows and perhaps that is why I have not noticed it until now. Resetting the BIOS possibly un-muted the sound on a BIOS level and I immediately noticed it when I booted? I checked and indeed, it is only present if I suspend or resume with the sound un-muted.

One mystery solved. Not sure I have much recourse on the SSD issue.... if it is indeed an SSD issue. I might be able to persuade Samsung to replace it under warranty, but if I read you all correctly, that won't really solve anything. At $165 for 250GB, that was about all I wanted to spend on the X61S. If I have to A) ditch the one I have already bought and B) buy a more expensive drive, I am not sure it is worth it. If resetting the BIOS is not a full cure, I will probably just take the speed hit and put the HD back in.

Any chance that the MD is not fully reliable at SATA2 speeds and it would work better on the OEM BIOS at SATA1 speeds? It was plenty fast and I didn't notice a huge difference when I switched to SATA2.

Paul

pgoelz wrote: Any chance that the MD is not fully reliable at SATA2 speeds and it would work better on the OEM BIOS at SATA1 speeds?

No.

I use an Evo 500GB in my X220. So far flawlessly.

The Evos already come somewhat over-provisioned from the factory. 8GB in the 128GB version, 6GB in the 256GB version and 12GB in the 512GB version are hidden from the user for that purpose, to the best of my understanding. Do you think it's not enough?

Should be enough with current advanced firmware and drivers, but reserving 10% is probably safer. On my ssd, I actually reserved 75%, since I don't store videos, games, or really anything much. Also, there can be a significant performance increase by doing this. It was mentioned in an anandtech article a couple years ago.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op

pgoelz wrote:Very odd problem. Extremely intermittently (like every 5th boot.... maybe less), the Win7 boot animation stalls and the machine becomes unresponsive. Pressing and holding the power button turns it off and it will restart but the boot animation will again freeze. Occasionally it will simply boot successfully after a couple tries but usually once this happens, I need to remove the power and battery to get it to boot again. Windows startup repair reports that it can't fix it but does not provide any clue as to what the problem is. The last time, even removing the battery didn't restore it and I went into BIOS and reverted to default settings, which restored it. I don't think I loaded default settings after installing Middleton BIOS so maybe something was mis-configured?

Note that I don't boot very often, so we are talking weeks between episodes. Once "fixed" it will boot repeatedly without issues.

After reverting to default BIOS settings, it now boots normally again but it makes a little audible "pip" when sleeping or waking from sleep. Don't ever recall that happening as long as I have owned it and I don't recall seeing anything in the BIOS that would control it? I'll try going back to the non-Middleton BIOS and see if anything changes. Is the "pip" perhaps an aborted beep?

When I first installed Win7 about four years ago, it did the same thing for a while. I seem to recall thinking it might have been trying to load a CDROM driver during boot because Win7 was installed while it was docked but it normally runs without a CDROM drive. I forget how it resolved but it never happened again until recently.

One more clue..... it will not shut down if I have a thumb drive plugged in. I'm pretty sure this is new, and it is a Windows think as far as I can tell, not a BIOS thing. I have Linux Mint on a thumb drive. If I plug the thumb drive in a tell the machine to reboot, the shutdown process stalls until I remove the drive. If I am running Linux from the thumb drive and tell Linux to shut down, it shuts down successfully. I am near certain that this is a new symptom that started at about the same time as the boot freeze.

Anyone have any insight?

Paul

Have you tried downloading the SSD updater from Samsung?

Altemose wrote:Have you tried downloading the SSD updater from Samsung?

If you mean the "Samsung Magician" program that came with the drive, yes. It says the firmware is up to date. I am about 30% overprovisioned (not including any OP that Samsung does in the background).

Paul

My 2c
I allways do "setup defaults" (F9) after flashing patched (eg Middleton's) BIOS. After that i have to restore my normal config in BIOS - but it is a small price.
I have samsung 840 256Gb (not evo and not pro) and it is working OK for a coupe of yeras in X61. Some OP is done when i have partitioned drive. But i tries to not overuse more of 80% capacity of partitions so there are planty of free space for SSD to use it for optimisation. Yes i know that TLC is worn faster than MLC - but time will tell.
About pip - try to go to the BIOS (F1) - Config - Alarm - and turn off (disabled) all except "Low Battery Alarm". I think these pips is by "Power Control Beep", but i have disabled "Password Beep" too.

brchan wrote:Should be enough with current advanced firmware and drivers, but reserving 10% is probably safer. On my ssd, I actually reserved 75%, since I don't store videos, games, or really anything much. Also, there can be a significant performance increase by doing this. It was mentioned in an anandtech article a couple years ago.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op

Very interesting article! Thanks for sharing.

What I'm trying to understand is this - is it actually required to leave some space unallocated, or is it enough that the space is just unused (not filling the drive to full capacity)? The article seems to suggest that with modern controllers and a TRIM-supporting OS, it is sufficient that the space is unused, but some of the responses claim differently. Is there a conclusive answer?

dr_st wrote:Is there a conclusive answer?

Unless I'm dealing with a SLC drive, I *always* leave 15-20% unallocated space. In my experience - mostly with Intel and Crucial units - it does make a difference.

Obviously, YMMV.

dr_st wrote:Is there a conclusive answer?

I don't understand difference between "unpartitioned space" and "unused space" from the OS point of view. This is block of sectors which haven't been written. For SSD thes sectors can be used for optimisation and wear leveling.
I have some unpartitioned space in begiging of drive (for first partition alignment and for OP) and try to not overuse free space. I have experience only with samsung and a couple of intel SSDs.

pgoelz wrote:Any comments on the little "pip" the MB makes as it suspends or resumes? This began after I reset the Middleton BIOS to defaults. Never did it until that point and I have owned the laptop for about 5 years and several BIOS revisions. It does it with both the SSD or the HD installed.

Paul

Answering my own question...... I never noticed before but there IS a power state change beep setting in BIOS. When ON (the default), it will beep on suspend or resume. Turned it off and the "pip" is gone. It was always set to off but got turned on when I reset the BIOS to default.

Paul

And a follow up.....

Since resetting the BIOS to defaults the failure to boot has not recurred. Hopefully, that was the problem.

I did notice an oddity though..... the boot animation screen (or at least the final frame) has several "stuck pixels" along the upper edge, about 2" from the left edge there is at least one red and one green. They look like actual stuck pixels, but they are not there at any time in any other black screen.... just when that particular image is present...... so I have to assume they are actually part of the image. I wonder how they got there.

Paul

Interestingly, I have the exact same problem on my X61S with (Crucial) SSD and Middleton BIOS, except that it happens on Windows 8.x. I have to remove the AC + battery and usually even wait for a couple of minutes afterwards before it boots again. Sometimes it gets really annoying.

I am still trying to find the exact reason. I had the same symptoms too when trying to install Windows 8 and upgrade to 8.1, however those were apparently caused by the upgraded Windows 8 loader. Until I saw your post I thought it was specific to Windows 8 (since I had 7 running perfectly on it), however now I am not sure anymore.

My TP also freezes during heavy wifi usage (first the connection drops and after about a 20 seconds or so it completely hangs) and I was thinking if it has anything do to with this (overheating?)...

Haven't tried resetting the bios yet, though.

Well, all I can say is that (knock on wood) it has not happened in the several weeks since I reset the BIOS to defaults so you might want to try that.

When I had an overheating issue, it didn't hang, it shut off RIGHT NOW. No beep, no warning. It just turned off like you pulled the plug.

There also may be something going on with CDROM drivers. When I first upgraded from XP to Windows 7, I used an external USB CDROM drive. The install went fine until I booted it the first time without the CDROM plugged in. That boot, and many subsequent boots, would hang at the beginning of the Windows logo animation. At that point I had not tracked the root cause down and ended up unplugging it, waving my hands around, doing the magic incantation, whatever... and it eventually stopped hanging during boot. Usually. But it would still hang on occasion. I finally did a boot trace and it seemed to be looking for a CDROM driver or drive and not finding it. Perhaps because the drive was not plugged in? In any event it just stopped hanging until after I installed the Middleton BIOS and neglected to reset the settings.

Paul

pgoelz wrote:Well, all I can say is that (knock on wood) it has not happened in the several weeks since I reset the BIOS to defaults so you might want to try that.

When I had an overheating issue, it didn't hang, it shut off RIGHT NOW. No beep, no warning. It just turned off like you pulled the plug.

There also may be something going on with CDROM drivers. When I first upgraded from XP to Windows 7, I used an external USB CDROM drive. The install went fine until I booted it the first time without the CDROM plugged in. That boot, and many subsequent boots, would hang at the beginning of the Windows logo animation. At that point I had not tracked the root cause down and ended up unplugging it, waving my hands around, doing the magic incantation, whatever... and it eventually stopped hanging during boot. Usually. But it would still hang on occasion. I finally did a boot trace and it seemed to be looking for a CDROM driver or drive and not finding it. Perhaps because the drive was not plugged in? In any event it just stopped hanging until after I installed the Middleton BIOS and neglected to reset the settings.

Paul

Did you figure out the overheating problem. It could be a bad fan, heatsink contact, or thermal paste.