T61 boot from Ubuntu Live Disc question

[emeraldgirl08]

Hi all. I recently came into possession of a T61 (model type in my sig) and I have managed to find parts needed to get it running. I noticed that when I try and boot a Live Linus Disc that I cannot get into the desktop session unless there is a hard drive present. If I remove the hard drive and run the live session of Ubuntu it will get get past the purplish-screen with the symbols at the bottom of the screen followed by a blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen. It will then blink indefinitely until I hold the power button to manually shut it down. When I insert the hard drive (blank and NTFS) formatted hard drive into the the bay and restart the linux live session it boots completely to a usable live linux desktop. When I initially received the T61 it had a very old BIOS from 2007. The finicky boot issue was present then. I bought a keyboard and decided to update the BIOS while I had a little time yesterday hypothesizing the old BIOS might be a cause. The T61 now has the latest BIOS however the finicky boot issue is persistent.

Not sure if it could be a BIOS setting? What setting would thwart a Live Linux run? RAM is fine. All the hardware components seem to be fine as well. I have a genuine Lenovo battery attached. Any ideas peeps? TIA.

[ajkula66]

I've noticed the same behaviour with Mint on *61 series...

Peppermint and PCLOS worked for me. I *think* Fedora did too.YMMV.

[emeraldgirl08]

Hi George

Thanks for chiming in! The T61 will see an installation of W7 soon. Testing out the T61 initially was done with a Live Ubuntu disc just to verify what did or did not work in respect to hardware. It is a long story but seeing how slow the forum is at times I'm sure you all won't mind

The T61 came without some components such as a keyboard, palmrest, DVD drive, wifi card, hard drive, and screws. There was a small square yellow-post it note attached to the bottom of the T61 which read 'gfx card problem.' I then thought I will not be satisfied with the diagnosis from the mystery person until I try it out myself. I have some spare parts here (as any ThinkPadder usually does) and also had an Ubuntu 13.04 live disc as well. Well it would boot into the BIOS menu just fine but if I tried loading a Live Linux session it would get to the flashing cursor and then reboot with repeating cycles afterwards. I noticed in BIOS that the screen was free of artifacts and when I moved the T61 around or gently flexed it there was no corresponding issues that appeared. Immediately I figured it would not hurt to do a reapplication of the thermal compound. As in most instances there was a liberal amount of thermal compound already present. The state of the compound has also seen better days! I did a reapplication with AS5 and satisfied with my application I reattached the heatsink and reassembled the T61. I then restarted it however it still would not boot to a usable desktop.

I had school duties to attend to do so I put the T61 away for the moment. When I found time a couple of days later I decided to give it a go again. I decided instead of removing the keyboard from my T500 I might be able to at least power on with a dock since it has a physical power button. I also remembered I had a cheap no-name android keyboard (for a 7" tablet of mine) which irritated me (typing on it is extremely tedious) and stuck in a box. Little did I know that it would actually come in handy!

http://images03.olx.in/ui/11/84/98/1340 ... ablets.jpg

So the time to test it out had arrived. I put the T61 on a dock and then hooked the mini-USB keyboard directly to the T61. I pressed F12 and inserted the Ubuntu 13.01. The dock powered the T61 and the rebooting cycles were still present. I then thought perhaps the USB ports were at fault. I checked those and the pins were all fine. I got a small light and peered into the HDD bay. Nothing strange there. I decided to put a blank and formatted HDD into the HDD bay just to see if it made a difference.

This time it booted into linux. This was nice and the rinky-dinky little USB keyboard actually redeemed itself somewhat. I think I just may keep the mini keyboard!

Anyhoo that is where I am at now. The screen is a WSXGA+ and it is an LG-Phillips. I have a Samsung WSXGA+ in my T500. My impressions in respect to the screen is that they are both decent. They both do not have a noticeably small viewing angle i.e. as the T400 where a small tilt of the screen inverts the colors (which annoyed me). They are both decent enough for my eyes and both show video quite well

Here are some pics of the testing environment with my T61:

http://imageshack.us/a/img850/5115/k0lz.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img18/2866/qe8f.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img856/5189/01bg.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img854/8341/a5dx.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img842/5699/e6qd.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img845/1204/u0kd.jpg