Thinkpads Forum

I have a system board failure on a T400 system here with Nvidia graphics. The replacement board has arrived from ebay, used and a bit questionable.

My question is what is the bare minimum I would need to hook up to the system to get it booted up and test that it works.

I know the CPU and fan assembly, RAM, AC power jack cable, CPU support plate, and some sort of display. Anything else? I just need a quick way of testing to boot to BIOS.

The seller has made clear that "UNIT HAS AT LEAST ONE BROKEN USB PORT" and he has many boards for sale so I assume he hasn't tested them all.

Keyboard is missing, that's all.

Okay I have put all that on and immediately when I plug in power supply it powers on starts fan, flashes some status lights and reboots over and over. Bad board?

tonepaq wrote: Bad board?

Check if the pins are exposed and/or touching one another/ground on all USB ports.

Can you connect an external monitor to the RGB port to see what's going on?

You have speakers plugged in? The machine could be powering off with a video error and could be trying to beep a code at you. Although boot looping on Thinkpad boards is very bad in my experience... but I second sktn77a's idea of trying to get something off an external monitor if possible as well.


However- Thinkpad T400 discrete GPU= ATI 3470, not NVIDIA. So... what board exactly do you have here?