Thinkpads Forum

problem:

powering on all i get is the thinkpad screen with "163264 MB OK" and after a few seconds some low volume, low pitch rapid fire ticking from the speakers for a second or less. it stays stuck on that screen and i cannot power up into bios mode either.

by removing and replacing the cmos batt i get error codes and the time/date screen but once i set it and exit i get the same problem.

have tried without the HDD and with the HDD from my T30 with the same results.


background:

a friend gave me this machine a few days ago and said it's dead and that before it died he sometimes had to "spank" it to get it working....by dead he meant that all it would do when powering up is show a "real scary error screen"

i powered it up, got the fan and cmos errors and after changing out the battery it would boot and run just fine. powered it up at least a dozen times and it never needed a spanking.

so i took it apart to clean out the dust and to paint the keyboard bezel. now it don't work.

anyone have any idea what i could have messed up while in there? why it needed spanking and if there is a component that commonly comes loose on these machines?



dave

I have run into this a few times. It means that there is either a problem with the ram or the ram slot. What kind of ram are you using? If you can post the part number off of the ram, it would be helpful.

Try booting without any ram, since the 600 series had 32mb ram onboard.

thank you!

yanked the ram and it booted just fine.

put the ram in the front slot and got a 19153 error.

put ram back into rear slot and now it boots just fine and shows a full 160MB of ram.

ram is NEC MC-4516CB64KS-A10B this is 128MB on a single stick with 4 chips per side.

is the problem you've seen something to do with the slots coming loose like on a T30? if so this would explain the need to "spank" the machine once in a while and would be an easy fix by reflowing the solder pads. hopefully this is the case and it's not something more sinister.



dave