unable to boot!

[astpaul]

It seems that nobody has met the same problem as I have currently


For some unknown reason to me VISTA (Ultimate) does not want to boot anymore on my T60 2007-94U.
It was working well until today. I did try, obviously, to boot the last known good config, and the last, and the last, and...... I got tired

Also I tried a bootable VISTA DVD image and it does not want to boot either!!!!

Any idea folks ?

(by the way, Hard disk seem to be fine and the boot sequence stops just before the small square that goes back and forth in the rectangle on top of Microsoft appears)

[amutz]

My shiny T61 with Vista Ultimate arrived a week ago. I used it for a few days, installing office 2005 among other bits and pieces, and then left it in sleep mode over the weekend. Apparently something became unhappy and it ran the battery down to zero rather than hibernate or otherwise shut down normally.

Monday morning it would not boot up. It gave me a blue screen with 'Unknown Hard Error' \systemroot\system32\ntdll.dll

The recovery partition wouldn't boot either. Further fun, restoring the C: partition from my backup (done the previous week using Acronis) also failed to help. Of course IBM doesn't ship media, so I was dead in the water.

IBM support shipped me a new HDD. I restored to that and got the same error message, suggesting my backup of C:\ was bad somehow.

IBM also shipped the restore disk set which I'm now using. I am still hoping to be able to restore my apps and files from backup - but we'll see how it goes.

I don't yet know if the problem was related to Vista and sleep on the T61 or related to an OS-problem which occurred prior to that - but for now I'm going to be very reluctant to use sleep on this system.

So it seems there is at least ONE other person with a similar problem!

[astpaul]

So it seems there is at least ONE other person with a similar problem!

Yup, welcome to the club! Although mine is not due to the sleep mode I think

[GomJabbar]

The following user says that "Patch Tuesday" from Microsoft killed his installation. Maybe the same thing happened to you.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=45721

[amutz]

I finished using Lenovo's restore disks to bring my system back to a 'bootable' state. Well - almost bootable. The utility partition still doesn't boot and the Vista install was a bit corrupted.

But I did get it installed enough to be able to run PC Doctor from the event viewer 'run' option. Like magic, I was able to find multiple errors during memory testing.

It APPEARS that Lenovo shipped the laptop to me with defective RAM. the memory failed PC Doctor testing intermittently even though it always succeeds in POST testing (when I had that option turned on.)

At this point my best guess is that the memory was bad from the start, resulting in a flawed install and rapidly degrading experience which corrupted data and applications. It's incredibly frustrating to have it surface AFTER I took the time to get the box all set up, and also frustrating that Lenovo couldn't find the problem either before they finished the system build/test or after I called them with the initial problem.

On the 'plus' side - the system is only a week or so old, so Lenovo gave me an RMA number for it and they are going to take it back and ship me a new one. In 10 days. Thank you, Lenovo!

(And I am so glad my old T41 still runs.)

Some things I learned.
1) when you get a new laptop, run PC Doctor (or other hardware tests). Cycle them 10 times. Run some benchmarks after that. Burn that puppy in well and make sure it's solid.

2) After system testing, and before app install, image the HDD using your favorite ghost-like tool. It's no fun getting back to the as-delivered state from DVDs.

3) After app install, image the HDD again - so both the as-delivered disk image and the app-install image are available to restore.

4) If you see suspect behavior on a new box - consider returning the box BEFORE you invest hours in diagnosis - Lenovo support is new to Vista and to the T61. It could take a long time....