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(Solved) T60 hanging and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrade

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(Solved) T60 hanging and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrade

#1 Post by Norway Pad » Wed Apr 23, 2014 2:36 pm

Hello all

Last night I went to the app store and downloaded and initiated the 8.1 upgrade for my T60 (ATI X1300). The procedure was pretty much the same as described here: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=111824, I also had to uninstall the Auto Scroll Utility. But after I booted into 8.1 for the first time, the problems started. Right after the Win logo at bootup I now hear a "sleep-beep", and the machine seems to wake up from sleep. (Or does it go into sleep?) Then I only get a gray screen, with the mouse pointer (Moveable) and nothing more. It can stay this was for 1 or 5 minutes before the desktop finaly shows up, and then the desktop too can remain unresponsive for 1-5 minutes. After that the machine seems to work ok, but when I open random applications, it can become unresponsive again for a little while. The 8.1 update wizard gave a quick message that there was a problem with the ATI CCC, so I tried to uninstall and reinstall the ATI software, but that didn't change anything. Needless to say that the T60 worked fine with Win8.

Has anyone had similar experiences with 8.1 on a T60 and can tell me more? I made an image of it while it had Win8, so the option if everything fails is to put back that image. But I would really like to know what is causing this.

Edit: Solution probably found, check my later post.

Thank you in advance!
Last edited by Norway Pad on Sun Feb 01, 2015 8:27 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: T60 hanging at boot and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrad

#2 Post by Norway Pad » Fri Apr 25, 2014 2:28 am

Much is tried, but no progress is made. No peripherals or dock connected, power management driver / graphics driver and a couple of other drivers uninstalled/reinstalled, 8.1 update (KB2883200) is applied and even BIOS is now updated. But status is the same, on 2 out of 3 boot ups, I get a beep right after the Win8 logo displays, and the screen just turns gray. Pointer is active, and it seems like stuff is still active "underneath". So issue is still unresolved, and since this is my main computer at the moment, I probably need to re-apply the image of Win8.

The next step, when I decide to sit down and play with this again, will probably be to make a clean Win8 install and apply the 8.1 upgrade *before* I install any drivers at all.

Edit: Before I went to bed last night, I checked Event Viewer / System, and found some critical errors listed as "Unknown EDID". I wasn't able to tie these to the failed boot ups, but will follow this up a little more before I call it a quit. Any experiences with this error? The EDID is the hardcoded ID of the LCD, AFAIK. The LCD is for now the SXGA+ panel that the laptop came with, so nothing has changed there.
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Re: T60 hanging at boot and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrad

#3 Post by dr_st » Fri Apr 25, 2014 7:55 am

Safe mode works fine?
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Re: T60 hanging at boot and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrad

#4 Post by Norway Pad » Fri Apr 25, 2014 9:23 am

Thanks for the input! Safe Mode always works fine, but I am not sure if that tells us much in this particular case. This error seems to only occur when I do a cold start. When I either reboot the laptop from the shutdown options in the OS, or wake it up from sleep, it always works fine. So the problem with Safe Mode in the case of Win8 is that I have never managed to boot it into Safe Mode from a cold start. Not sure if you have used Win8, but you have to go to the Metro charms bar, and through various menus make the laptop REBOOT into Safe Mode. And since the error never occurs when I just do a reboot, Safe Mode will always work too. Win8 is a little complicated.. :??:

Anyway, I tried one last thing right now, which was to alter values for entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atierecord to stop the logging of ATI related errors. (The EDID error) According to another user on the Lenovo forum, this change fixed similar problems in XP. But to no avail. So booting down to let Clonezilla put back regular Win8 now.

But please let input come. As long as I have the Win8 image, and can revert easily, I will most likely give 8.1 another go in the near future. Maybe try from a clean Win8 install, to have less chances of incompatibility issues. If that's what this is..

Edit: Now that I am back on Win8, I realize that the beep at bootup occurs there as well. So the beep has nothing to do with this, just the fact that the screen goes gray.
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Re: T60 hanging at boot and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrad

#5 Post by dr_st » Fri Apr 25, 2014 11:16 am

Norway Pad wrote:So the problem with Safe Mode in the case of Win8 is that I have never managed to boot it into Safe Mode from a cold start. Not sure if you have used Win8, but you have to go to the Metro charms bar, and through various menus make the laptop REBOOT into Safe Mode. And since the error never occurs when I just do a reboot, Safe Mode will always work too. Win8 is a little complicated.. :??:
Yes, I am aware of this issue in Win8. :) I wouldn't call this particular aspect 'complicated'. More like - "downright dumb". As in "a decision made by someone who is such a complete idiot that in the contest of idiots he would finish second, because he is such an idiot".

The reason for that is that Win8 spends only a very very short time waiting for the F8 on startup. And the reason for that is, of course, so that it could boot faster. Because everybody knows that shaving 1 second from boot time is the most crucial improvement one can make to an operating system.

Yes, sometimes even folks at Microsoft, who I generally hold in fairly high regard, have total brain farts.

One workaround, BTW, is to mess with the BCD boot loaded to force it to display a boot menu on startup, even if you only have one OS. While the boot menu is active (even if it's for just one second), you can press F8 and it will take you to the startup options menu, as before.

Anyways, back on topic:

Your issues definitely sound like a driver problem. One of the curious things about 8.1 is that it actually presents itself as a different OS from 8. It even has a different version (6.3). It's possible that some drivers that were written with 8 in mind implement certain things poorly when they encounter 8.1.

In any case, do let us know if you resolve this issue. My personal recommendation would be obtaining a Win8.1 install and starting from there.
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Re: T60 hanging at boot and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrad

#6 Post by Norway Pad » Fri Apr 25, 2014 11:53 am

I agree totally on your use of words for Win8. :lol: My views on this is covered in another thread, but generally I am not happy with the path Windows went after Win7. Ok for touch screens, not so much for desktops.. I tried the F8 too, of old habit, but it never worked. So I was a little surprised to find the reason why.

And I also think a clean install is the way to go. Either a Win8 with no drivers or even a 8.1, as you say. It seems to be possiblre to do a clean install even with a Win8 key: http://www.howtogeek.com/187525/how-to- ... ows-8-key/ I was also a little puzzled by the fact that 8.1 was listed as a separate OS on the compatibility list on Lenovo's driver site. Wonder what's up with that, I sure hope they don't start doing this instead of releasing Service Packs, which could just be installed on top of the old OS with no issues.

On the other side, other users seems to have succeeded with the 8 -> 8.1 upgrade on T60 machines, so we know the basic hardware is compatible. I will keep you guys updated.
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Re: T60 hanging at boot and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrad

#7 Post by rjashall » Sat Jun 21, 2014 1:21 pm

Bjorn - I was just wondering if you had had any luck with this? I am having the exact same problem - boots to unresponsive black screen - I am wondering if it's the video driver, as uninstalling it seems to help - but I need the driver to run my external monitor. The solution I have found so far is that after boot I press the sleep mode buttons and when the computer goes to sleep then wake it up and it is fine.

I have the radeon x1400 driver running in compatibility mode for vista - I am wondering about trying the xp driver - if anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them.

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Re: T60 hanging at boot and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrad

#8 Post by PatrickJ » Tue Jul 22, 2014 9:33 pm

See my recent post re W8.1 and the T60P issues - you may need to install the Vista version of ATI's CCC - post back here if you have problems.

I think you've hit a problem with an incompatible driver/OS version - so reboot in Safe Mode and also take a look at the eventlogs - look carefully at any ATI2MTAG or related errors. (It sounds obvious but lots of folks forget to check the Event Logs - which AFAIK are accessible in Safe mode.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=114886

Hope this helps.

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(Solved) T60 hanging and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrade

#9 Post by Norway Pad » Sun Feb 01, 2015 4:39 am

I almost forgot that I made this post. As a general conclusion: Yes, it was the graphics driver that caused this, and I found a permanent fix that works in my case. Hope this input can help others as well.

Doing a clean install is so much work, that I decided to give the Win8.1 upgrade one more shot. On the first cold reboot after the upgrade was done, I saw the blue window and the juggling balls, then I got a black screen where only the cursor was visible. Luckily the desktop showed up after 3-4 minutes, and the computer generally wasn't as crippled and unresponsive as last time I tried this. I was given the same error message, regarding the lack of compatibility of the ATI / Catalyst software. So I uninstalled these components, and this time it seemed to fix the issue. But with the generic Microsoft driver, it didn't pick up my external monitor, just like rjashall also complains about. So I wasn't satisfied with this.

I later tried to mobility mod the 10-02 legacy driver from ATI, but it didn't work when I tried to install it. So I decided to give the Lenovo graphics driver another try. I made a Clonezilla backup image, and went ahead and reinstalled the ATI software in Vista compatibility mode. And as expected; the problem reoccurred. It worked fine on warm boots, but on cold boots I got the same black screen with the moveable cursor. One time the desktop showed up after 4-5 minutes, most times not. Like rjashall, I discovered that if I right after boot put the laptop to sleep by using Fn+F4 and then woke it back up, the desktop showed up every time. Everything else worked just fine, so this could probably have been used as a permanent workaround if nothing else worked. But it dawned on me that something simply wasn't started properly, like it somehow didn't come out of sleep. Then we know that Win8/8.1 has the above mentioned Fast Startup feature, which puts the laptop in some kind of hibernation when you turn it off, and as a long shot I decided to disable that. I did, and so far that seems to have fixed the issue. It added maybe 10-15 seconds to the boot up time, but the T60 has started just fine from cold startups every time since that.

Turning off Fast Startup is done under Power Options / Chose what the power buttons do-link on the left. Note that you need to click the link "Change settings that are currently unavailable" in order to be able to change this setting.

I will post here if something changes or if I run into any issues later.

Did you ever make this work, rjashall? It sure took a long time before I attempted an 8.1 upgrade again, but better late than never. :)
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Re: (Solved) T60 hanging and unresponsive after Win8.1 upgrade

#10 Post by Norway Pad » Mon Mar 16, 2015 1:52 pm

I'm adding one more post here, hoping it can give some input. After I solved the issue mentioned above, I realized there is a little problem left. At random times explorer.exe hangs. When I try to use an open file explorer window or click the taskbar or Start button, the mentioned items are unresponsive for 8-10 seconds and then restart. Desktop and taskbar goes gray for a split second, just to come back and then work again. (Event Viewer message: The program Explorer.EXE version 6.3.9600.17667 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed.) This isn't any big problem, rather an annoyance.

There are several solutions posted online, related to the above mentioned Event Viewer message, but no solution has worked. The pattern of hang changes, but it always comes back. As the hang didn't occur when the graphics driver wasn't installed, I have to assume that's the definite reason, and so far it seems like it's difficult to make this install run flawless with the ATI driver installed. So "mostly solved" would be a better subject for this thread. Working, but not optimal.

Particularly now that the Win8.1 ISO is available for download from Microsft, it seems more sensible than ever to bite the bullet and do a clean 8.1 install..
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