Thinkpads Forum

My 600X will not boot properly. When the power switch is pushed the battery light is on as well as all the the other indicator lights but the orange light on the left that signals hard drive operation stays lit.So does the green light on the far right. Nothing appears on the display but the cpu fan spins as well as the hard drive. Occasionally the computer will boot up as if there was no problem. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.


600x PIII 500MHZ
320 MB Ram, 20GB HD
Win XP SP3

I would try two things:

First, remove the MiniPCI modem from the bottom of the system. When those cards go bad it can affect the system; power and boot issues being the usual issues. If you can get the system to consistently boot with the card out then plug it back in and see if the boot problem returns.

If that doesn't seem to do anything, then pull the hard drive out and see if the system attempts to properly boot.

I have a 600e with a similar problem. The operating system is Windows 2000 and the computer will not boot unless it is warmed up first. Warming up can consist of several boot up tries - eventually it boots all the way up. Oddly if I change to a different hard drive with Windows 98, there is no problem booting up. I have tried Windows 2000 on another hard drive but still have boot up problems. My hypothesis is that there is a power circuit problem on the motherboard and Win2000 takes more current starting up than Win98 or DOS. Maybe a connection on the motherboard is intermittent and warm-up makes the connection good.

Do repeated boot attempts, one right after the other, get the 600x going? If you try to boot from a DOS floppy does it work?

I removed the modem previously and it didn't resolve the boot issue. I have not attempted to boot from floppy but multiple attempts occasionally result in a proper boot.