ThinkPad 600X Conundrum: Post Error

[pingme1X]

A perplexing question for the group; my upgraded 600X (replaced Speed Step system board CPU with 850 MHz processor from original 650 MHz processor) has developed a Post problem. When turning the unit on with the power switch the system will not POST. The CPU fan makes a high speed sound for 5 or 10 seconds then drops down to the normal fan power and POST does not start. After several flicks of the power switch, finally the RAM count will appear in the upper left hand corner of the screen and the system will finally POST and the OS (Windows XP) will start. The system will run without issue until the next power on startup. Sometimes the system will start on the first attempt, but usually it takes several tries of the power on switch to start the system. Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated. The only other upgrade to the original system is: added a RW CD Drive and a 60 GB Hard Disk. The system has 456 Mb RAM. Thanks again for any assistance with this “Conundrum”.

[pkiff]

Don't know, but here are some things to investigate.

In each case listed below, try to boot the laptop TWICE in a row, as the first boot after a changed configuration can take additional time while it reconfigures the boot sequence:

- take out the CDRW drive and see if it boots up smoothly with the drive completely removed -- also make sure that you don't have a disk in the CDRW drive when booting

- take out your removable memory modules and see if you still get the same symptoms (maybe you have a module that is starting to go flakey) -- then you could even run memtest on your base module if the problem is still showing

- if you had a second hard drive, you could swap it in and check if it boots up OK with a different hard drive (I expect it would, but that just points to a full reinstall as a solution)

- you could try changing your BOOT device order in BIOS and removing all boot devices except your hard drive (the lack of posting could be caused by a failure to activate a device listed there for some reason)

- turn OFF "QuickBoot" option in your BIOS, or if it is already OFF, try turning it ON.

- check under "Hardware Profiles" to make sure you didn't somehow create a new hardware profile by accident

- do a complete and full virus check and disk scan to eliminate those as possible culprits

- is your hard disk configured as a single drive (i.e. you've got no hidden partitions, no multiple OS boot sectors)? A semi-corrupted MBR could cause an issue similar to this.

Phil.