X301 Integrated Camera Magically GONE even in Bios.

[Kaze22]

I swear to god if I gotta buy a new Camera I'm gonna be [censored]. I've spent enough money on this laptop as is.

Ok here's the deal, I haven't used the integrated camera in this thing since god knows when, but I have used it before.
Today I tried using it for Skype, another program that I haven't used in god knows when.

I press Function F6 and guess what No CAMERA. I go to deviced manager, and guess what NO CAMERA.
I go into the system Bios's I/O manager and you guessed it, NO CAMERA.

The camera has magically dissappeared, vanished.

I wanted to see this vanishing act in person, so I stripped the X301 down and lord be hold the Camera is there plugged in just like always.
I then stripped the entire laptop down right down to the MOBO, to check to see if the there was any connector issue between the LCD connector and the MOBO, everything is fine. The LCD works perfect, but the Camera doesn't.

Now, I'm inclined to buy a new camera, it's only like 30-40 bucks, but before I do has anyone else encountered this problem?

This is not a Windows 7 driver issue, because the camera doesn't even exist in bios I/O.
I'm completely stumped, the connectors seem to fine, I checked it myself. The camera could be dead. I don't know.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. It doesn't have to be X301 Camera, it could any Thinkpad. Has anyone had this issue in any other Thinkpads. Any potential fix?

I hate to buy a new camera just to find out it was some weird bios glitch.

Bios Version I'm running is 3.15 latest.


Thanks.

[Kaze22]

Can anyone confirm the camera is working on the new 3.15 BIOS update?
I just want to know if its the bios

[vinuneuro]

Roll back to an earlier version and see if 3.15 is the issue.

[Kaze22]

I flashed my old 3.14 no whitelist bios, just to see it'll help.
Still no camera. I could keep going back but lord knows if thats the issue.

I'm just gonna buy a new camera and see if that'll fix it.
It's only 30 and change. No big deal.

[dr_st]

The camera is a USB device. Maybe one of the internal USB ports is bad. Or it can be the camera itself, of course.

[91011]

If you haven’t tried yet, I would put in a different drive, do a clean Win 7 install and get the Integrated Camera driver from Lenovo:

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloa ... D=DS003078

IIRC, the Win 7 install doesn’t find the camera.
That would pretty much rule out any non-hardware problem.

[vinuneuro]

It's not even showing up in the BIOS, has nothing to do with Windows.