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T420s - randomly offing itself

T400/T410/T420 and T500/T510/T520 Series
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Lockheed
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Location: France (most of the time)

T420s - randomly offing itself

#1 Post by Lockheed » Sun Jun 04, 2017 4:49 pm

I have a problemy with my T420s. First, it started randomly generating a signal as if the power button was pressed, so it gracefully shutdown at random occasions, but only when I was typing on the right side of the keyboard. I replaced the keyboard, but it did not change anything, so I just disabled power and suspend button actions (on linux) and it did the trick.

However, two weeks later (few days ago), the laptop started shutting down not-gracefully, ie. it becomes off instantly, without waiting for the system to shutdown. And this time it is unrelated to whether I am touching the laptop, or it is just sitting there. Also, is is not overheating at those times, so we can exclude emergency overheating shutdown (unless the mechanism is failing).
I did memory test with memtest, but found no problem. So at this point I am ready to assume it is motherboard's fault and am planning on replacing it.

If anyone has any other suggestion, please chip in.

Anyway, as I am doing so, I am musing on replacing it with Intel-only GPU, since Nvidia is only 20% quicker, eats more battery and causes problems when connecting external monitor through DisplayPort.
T420s - i7, 16GB RAM, Samsung 850 EVO + 1TB Hitachi 9.5mm, Nvidia, Oleh Bios.
W500 - C2D P9500, 8GB RAM, Samsung 830 SSD + 750GB Hitachi HDD, Intel+ATI GPU, bright WUXGA, FP-reader
Arch Linux, BTRFS+ZFS on LUKS

Hans Gruber
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Re: T420s - randomly offing itself

#2 Post by Hans Gruber » Mon Jun 05, 2017 5:11 am

Pull the bios battery for 30 seconds and plug it back in. Reset the bios to factory default settings and maybe hold the power button down for 10 seconds 10 times for good measure with the battery disconnected.
:beer: T43p,T61,X200,X200s,x201,T500,W500,T510,T410,T410s,T420s,T430,T430s :parrot:

xsixt
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Re: T420s - randomly offing itself

#3 Post by xsixt » Tue Nov 07, 2017 10:49 pm

That in my opinion sounds like a faulty system board or faulty ram.

However, if the RAM was faulty I think it might blue screen before it shuts down. Any blue screens?

How long did you run MEMTest for? And you ran it with only one stick?

With my T420s with faulty ram, I had to run it on memtest for 10+ hours - and even then it didn't give an error, it just rebooted itself.

So I would pull out all the components (HDD, CD etc.) and run memtest or a cpu burn test using bootable linux (e.g. Ultimate Boot CD) and run it overnight and report back.
T60p 15" UXGA T7600 | T61p 15.4" WUXGA T9500 |
Former: X61 T8300 [Slow GPU] | W510 FHD QM [Top screen but 16:9 sucks] | T420s [Portable but worst LCD ever] | X201 | X200 | X60T [Slow & hot]

jaspen-meyer
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Re: T420s - randomly offing itself

#4 Post by jaspen-meyer » Wed Nov 08, 2017 2:49 pm

Are you sure it's not thermal shutdown?

To be sure, I would run a cpu intensive process (use all cores) and monitor temperature:

Here is a one-liner (requires lm-sensors)

Code: Select all

~$ while sleep 0.5;do sensors | grep "temp1:" ;done
T420 i7 3612QM seabios; T420 i7 3630QM; T400 Q9100 seabios; T61 P9600; T60 libreboot; x62; x60s libreboot, led; x24 xiphmont led

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