Thinkpads Forum

I was clearing out my storage and stumbled upon my old X200s, which I had forgotten I still had. Took it home and tried to get it to start up, but although the battery still takes a charge(!) other than the charge/power LEDs the system remains utterly dead. I've tried the usual things; removing battery & AC and pressing the power button repeatedly before reconnecting AC, left the battery to charge up and tried starting with only battery, removed CMOS battery for a few minutes and tried again, then tried without the CMOS battery, on AC, on battery, etc, etc. Nothing, zip, nada. Pretty sure power button is functional; at least it feels perfectly fine. Any suggestions?

Try removing all of the memory modules and see if you at least get the 1-3-3-1 beep sequence. If not, then most likely the motherboard is toast although you could try a teardown and see if you can see anything obvious (exploded electrolytic capacitor, blown MOSFET, etc.).

On further thought.... it could be a bad keyboard (power button). Do you have a docking station / Ultrabase for it? If so, mount the laptop, connect power and use the dock's power button. If that works, then open up the system re-seat the keyboard's ribbon cable and try again.

And I guess if you don't get anywhere with the advice above, then the usual non-boot/non-power advice applies: remove all removable hardware. This means the HDD, PCI Express card(s), Bluetooth daughter card. If the system then boots with the bad/missing memory beep code, then add in one hardware item at a time and re-boot. If the system then stops powering up, the last item you added is probably bad.

Thanks, that was a very thorough walk-through of all the different things to try! Sadly it didn't help, and I've been unable to get a beep out of the machine Going on eBay as a spares machine...