A31 wont boot up

[arubinst]

My faithful A31 wont boot up. By that I mean I hit the power key, and all the small lights come on except the harddrive light. The screen stays blank but you can see there is illumination in the screen.

This started happening occassionally a few weeks ago. I would have to hit the power button a few times, and then the hard drive would 'take'. My remedy was to not shut down. However I had to leave on vacation and didnt want to keep all the power on so I did a full backup of my data & shut the machine down. When I got home, despite repeated trys, the harddrive wouldnt engage.

First I thought the problem was the harddrive itself. About a year ago, I had upgraded from 40GB to 80GB and put my old drive in a USB case for safekeeping. Tonight, I swapped the drives and put my original drive back in the A31. It took about 9 times, but the Windows screen finally engaged, but then hiberated because the battery must have been too low (I couldnt get the power cord out fast enough to prevent this.) Then the A31 wouldnt come back on again.

So maybe the problem is something other than the harddrive.

I wasnt sure about this, but I also tried plugging my 80GB drive into my work Thinkpad, but altho the TP recognized the harddrive was plugged in, I couldn't see it listed on My Computer. I think that is because it is a bootable disc. Is that right?

Anyway, I'm not sure how to proceed. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Andrea

[ulrich.von.lich]

I wasnt sure about this, but I also tried plugging my 80GB drive into my work Thinkpad, but altho the TP recognized the harddrive was plugged in, I couldn't see it listed on My Computer. I think that is because it is a bootable disc. Is that right?

I think you should be able to access it even if it's a bootable disc. I was able to access my T43's hard drive on my friend's ThinkPad via Ultrabay Slim adapter. (It should be the same if you use a USB connection)

What I'm going to say below is not certain:

If you put your hard drive in the USB case then plug it to your work TP, make sure it's powered by the AC wall adapter, if there's any. It's the only reason I can figure out why it's recognized but can't be accessed.

Have you tried putting your work TP's hard drive into your A31 then loading a live OS such as Ubuntu to see what will happen?

Bad memory modules could sometimes cause problems too. You might want to inspect them before deciding it's a motherboard problem.

I'm no expert and that's all that I can tell you. I hope some senior members in the forum will show you a warm welcome by providing more precise answers to your particular problem.

Best of luck,
Tony

[arubinst]

Tony, sorry it took me a few days to reply. I took a computer break for Thanksgiving. Thanks for your suggestions.

I think you should be able to access it even if it's a bootable disc. I was able to access my T43's hard drive on my friend's ThinkPad via Ultrabay Slim adapter. (It should be the same if you use a USB connection)

I had my harddrive in an external case in a powered USB port and tried to open it on my work Thinkpad. It never showed up on My Computor. Then I tried using a powered USB port to open it on my new MacBookPro. (gasp) It showed the harddrive # as a server and asked for a password (which I never remember setting), so I couldnt see what was on there.

Have you tried putting your work TP's hard drive into your A31 then loading a live OS such as Ubuntu to see what will happen?

I've never used Ubuntu and didnt try swapping harddrives. When things slow down at work, I will try that.

Bad memory modules could sometimes cause problems too. You might want to inspect them before deciding it's a motherboard problem.

Not sure how I would test this.

Meantime, I seem to have had recent backups of just about all of my important files, so I'm less frantic now about my TPs condition. If I cant get it to work as a backup/guest machine, then I am just stuck deciding what to do with it..

[ajkula66]

Try pulling out whatever memory you have in there and testing different chips in different slots...

To me, this sounds like a motherboard issue, but can be a lot more benign than that. I'm going to say it's almost definitely NOT the hard drive.

Borrowing a "live" Linux disk and trying to boot from it is a good idea. You also may want to download a copy of PC-doctor from Lenovo's website and run that once the machine is up...

Good luck and let us know...