Thinkpads Forum

Hi to all members of this community!. I have seen that there are quite a lot of experienced thinkpad users and fans here, I hope you are able to help me…

Recently I have found crashed ibm thinkpad i series 1200 laptop. The exact model is 1161-11g. Since the top cover and LCD screen were broken I connected it to another display.
When I started it, I can access bios setting by pressing F1 or select boot device by pressing F12. Everything goes really good until the memory test. The laptop has 160 Mb Ram which is 32Mb of build-in memory extended by 128Mb of additional one. When it reaches 160 Mb during the memory test, it stops, then starts to beep and black screen appears. The interesting thing is that when I press ESC it stops beeping and starts to OS. The beeping does not match to any beeping pattern described in manual.

Can anyone give me a helping hand? How can find out what is the problem?
I downloaded the Pc diagnostic tool from IBM website and all components passed their tests.

Thanks in advance…

welcome to the forum!

not sure what is causing the error beeps, but if you should decide to tear the machine down looking for damaged components, the hardware maintenance manual, located here: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-4KZUYK should help.

good luck.

Actually, the laptop is already in pieces because I was removing components one by one looking for failure reason. I have also already seen this manual, but it has leaded me nowhere.
Thanks for quit replay!

Can you recommend any software for system board diagnostic, I am looking for something that can point out the problem.

sorry... other than pc doctor, which you've used, no.

best of luck.

Any other suggestions, someone?

What is the pattern of the beeps (long / short etc) ? Is it the same each time you start ?

It is nearly continues beeping, it starts when bypass memory test ends.
I removed the 128Mb additional memory in order to test the build-in 32 Mb Ram with memtest. The test has detected no errors….

Yes, the beeping occurs every time I turn on the laptop.

wojcik_w wrote:Since the top cover and LCD screen were broken I connected it to another display. [....] When it reaches 160 Mb during the memory test, it stops, then starts to beep and black screen appears. The interesting thing is that when I press ESC it stops beeping and starts to OS.

Is it possible that this is not actually related to the memory at all, and that all that is happening is that it is beeping because of the broken LCD? Maybe it is beeping because the LCD is reporting back invalid error codes or something? This might explain why you could then bypass the beeping and continue on to boot up while attached to an external monitor...it is trying to connect to the LCD and fails, but then is correctly able to connect to an external monitor through the VGA out. So the video card is fine, but the LCD and/or LCD cable are bad?

Phil.

You might be right, but it beeps even with LCD disconnected from the system board.