Considering giving up on X220: HDD not always found during boot

[yankeesamurai]

It started with a sudden loss of power.

You missed the obvious troubleshooting clue, "sudden loss of power with battery & power supply connected" .... this indicates
a faulty power regulator diode on the mother board... ( after overheating cpu is excluded )which any electronics tech (real tech, with voltmeters, osicilliscopes, ect)
can check using a common volt meter, by simply attaching test leads to the voltage diode(s) and booting up, watching the voltage
change on the diode, it will drop from full voltage (5vdc or 12vdc depending on the diode) to zero quickly and poof you got a dead unit
agian, after that bad diode cools off..its ok till it heats up again ( which usually takes about 5 seconds ) simple job to find compatable
replacement diode and unsolder it and resolder new one.. then retest, if happens again then test the remaining couple of diodes to
find the other bad one and fix it. (good diode will show full voltage even as unit goes dead so good and bad diodes are easy to spot)
Lastly...if the diodes are all fixed, and you have some bizzare voltage type issues, then some big caps got fried...(they can be replaced too , usually they show bulging, leaking, exploded..burned..) this is all indicative
of a motherboard that got hit by lightening or power surge... the diodes and caps are protective of the motherboard.. so fixing them
on the repair bench is a simple job for a real electronics tech... but might cost as much to pay them for an hour of work and parts than to buy good mother board..

good luck.

[bit_twiddler]

Exorcism advice welcome.

I'm not so good at cases like this where you have a little girl with a head that's spinning around, but...

Do you have another power adapter you can try? Also, I ran into a case about 15 years ago
where the AC was under the normal voltage range, and all kinds of equipment got fried.
Do you have a way of testing the voltage at the wall socket? Do you have any other
equipment behaving weirdly?

[yankeesamurai]

Hello,


>> this is absolutely a hardware issue, you are loosing connectivity from the hard drive to the mother board somehow...i would
pull the drive..check the little slots on the motherboard where the drive connects..with a hi power magnifying glass..see if there
isnt a dustbugger down in there, also look for corrosion... the metal in the slots should be bright and shinny silver of gold..no brown green or black..

your thoughts on the battery are easily checked, just take it out.. run on Ac POWER.. ..does it still do the same thing ?

for the linux suspend issue, turn off disable any screensavers also turn off require pw on resume if its an option...
also check your start up apps list.. (in control center) for non critical start up apps..turn the off..so they dont start automatically

one of these might fix your issue.



Mark

[markstos]

yankeesamurai,

Your analysis sounds right.

I have my own multi-meter and am familiar with capacitors going bad on monitors, but haven't run into a bad diode on a motherboard before and didn't recognize the symptom.

There is a decent electronics repair shop in town, but even at a rate or $35/hour for one hour, I could just try another motherboard.

I did open up the case one more time and review my connections. It looked like the monitor cable securing clip hadn't been pressed down (but the connection with that cable otherwise looked solid). I put the laptop back together and it ran over 24 hours without a problem. psensor showed stable temperatures throughout this time.

Then my wife tried to use it for a real work and it crashed a few minutes. Reboot. Crashed again in a few more minutes.

Before I came back and caught up on this thread tonight I went on eBay about bought... another X220 for about $105 plus shipping. Despite my bad experience with this and *two* problematic motherboards, I've had many great experiences with Thinkpads overall, and I happen to have a complete set of spare parts for this one!

Here's hoping the next one works better than my last two!

Maybe I'll show my kids how to take part the old one and test diodes.

Thanks again for all the help everyone!

[markstos]

I just noticed another way in which I may have hamfisted the motherboard replacement.

I see now that the old motherboard had black plastic stickers covering both sides, and I failed to transfer that to the new motherboard.

So if that mattered, oops.