X61S / Middleton / SSD intermittently won't boot

[pgoelz]

Did you figure out the overheating problem. It could be a bad fan, heatsink contact, or thermal paste.

Yes. It was overheating due to dust in the heat exchanger. I took the keyboard out to get to the fan side of the exchanger, blew it out thoroughly in both directions with compressed air and all was well again.

Paul

[Altemose]

Did you figure out the overheating problem. It could be a bad fan, heatsink contact, or thermal paste.

Yes. It was overheating due to dust in the heat exchanger. I took the keyboard out to get to the fan side of the exchanger, blew it out thoroughly in both directions with compressed air and all was well again.

Paul

Glad it was simple and you didn't have to pull the heatsink.

[pgoelz]

Reviving an old thread.....

The boot hang came back the other day during my attempt to upgrade to Windows 10. Like the very first time, all went well until the first boot after the "copying files" step. The subsequent boot hung at the boot animation. Long pressing the power button forced a shutdown and reboot, which hung again a couple times. I finally got it to boot and the upgrade completed but it continued to hang sporadically.

I finally reset the BIOS to defaults and it has stopped hanging. I am near certain that the issue has nothing to do with the actual BIOS settings since it will boot normally most of the time. My best guess is that something gets corrupted and a reset to defaults clears it. But that is just a guess.

Paul

[pgoelz]

Well, here we are a week later and zero issues after the BIOS reset.

Another data point.... back when I first upgraded my other X61s (1.6GHz) from XP to windows 7 (and LONG before I installed the SSD), I had the identical issue. It would sporadically hang during the Windows boot animation. It was ALMOST at the same spot each time but not exactly. Back then, I looked through the boot logs and it looked like the hang occurred when the OS looked for the CDROM driver or maybe the CDROM itself. On the X61s of course there is no CDROM but A) I had used the CDROM in the docking base recently and B) I had changed the BIOS to attempt to boot from CDROM before it tried the HD. Back then, I think a BIOS reset cured it, same as now. There should be an old thread about it on here somewhere. It was as much a mystery then as now.

Paul