Advise for a bricked w510 please

[JohnD.]

Hi Guys/Girls,
So I bought recovery disks for my W510 on Thursday and got them the next day. So Sunday I used them to bring the machine to a clean install. I wanted to sell the machine so that is why I got the recovery disks.

Now, I noticed that the Lenovo Toolbox/System Update program was not installed. So I went to the driver section of Lenovo’s support Web Site. I installed the program and during the install I see it flashing the bios. I saw how it was checking each “segment” and a count down from “49 of 49” to “1/0 of 49”. The machine rebooted and I got the ThinkPad splash screen. It sat there for a few mins. I gave it another few mins. So I powered the machine down. I turned the unit on, I saw the green circle light around the power button come on, then a few lights flickered (one of them was the ThinkPad light) and went out. I heard the CD-Rom go at it and that’s it. Nothing on the screen. So I figured the machine got bricked. I tried holding the the power button down for 30 seconds (without the battery connected) and reattached the power cord with the battery and nothing still.

I called Lenovo Support and the person agreed with me that the bios failed. The person said that probably I need a new planar board. He said that he needed a credit card to place a $575 hold for the repair since the warranty expired in May 2011. He said the repair would be probably be a little less but if it was more Lenovo would call me and tell me. I told him to give me a ticket number and I would think about it.

I know things happen where we don’t have control in our lives. It’s how we handle it. There is someone selling the BIOS chip on EBay for the W510 for $39. I am not afraid of taking the machine apart since I have taken three laptops apart but I wonder if someone out there knows of someone that could do this for me. I have a feeling that the BIOS chip is a Surface Mount component and I have never soldered a component that small.

The other path that I can go is selling the Blu-Ray drive from the W510 and the battery. I would just sell the machine as parts, meaning just keep the machine together and sell it as a unit. It's a quad core cpu i7-720QM I believe. It does not have the FHD screen.
So, I am looking for some thoughts on what path I should go down. I bought this machine in November 2011 and hardly used the unit. I was hoping to get $500 when it was working.

Thank you for your help and time,

John

[Adda]

I don't know how to help you fix your problem, but I do have some advise on how to flash the bios in the future.

It seems that everyone who has bricked a ThinkPad by flashing the bios, has done so using TVSU, I don't recall a single exception to this.

I have updated and downgraded ThinkPad bioses through windows, using the program you get from the driver matrix with no issues, I always remember to reboot the system first though, when it has finished starting up I flash.
Never had a problem, but with all the problems you read about, it's not a very funny thing to do.

Lately I have switched to doing from a bootable CD, I use a DVD-RAM as I have never experienced any write errors or reading problems with this media.

[richk]

The BIOS is certainly a surface mounted chip, and it is a multi-layered board with lead-free, very-high-temperature solder, so you need fairly good equipment to work on it. (minum configuration is a quartz preheater and a good rework station, plus complete disassembly of the machine) The BIOS is logically tied to another chip on the motherboard, so the contents of the chip on your board is or was different from every other W510 chip. Replacing the chip with a generic chip defeats the TPM security system on your machine, so discussion of that process would violate the policy against discussing measures to bypass security. If things go in that direction, I will lock the thread.

I will say that sometimes the security signatures are intact and only the code portions are damaged, so it is theoretically possible to read out the contents of your chip and repair the damage, but that takes a lot more work, requires sophisticated equipment and may not be worth the cost, especially since the entire contents (both code and signature) are often damaged and the work is not successful.

Also, I have a W510 board in stock that I would like to use, so if you wish to sell your non-working machine for parts, send me a pm.