Help! T430 bricked!

[XE1UFO]

Dear friends:

I was trying a Fedora Linux Live CD, And suddenly my T430 began showing stripes on the screen. I tried the old "Remove battery and power plug, and then the CMOS battery, and wait 30 minutes" routine with no success. Screen comes on divided in 3 equal-sized vertical blocks in 3 shades of grey, and goes nowhere after that.

Thanks in advance!

[theterminator93]

Do you get anything on an external monitor? Caps lock key responding?

Had an X24 do something identical which ended up being the LCD...

[XE1UFO]

Thanks for your reply!

No keys respond. Tomorrow I will try the external monitor.

[XE1UFO]

Quick update: I left the battery out and power disconnected for 30 minutes, and it started as if no problem. I was more excited than a mosquito in a nudist colony for sure! But within a few minutes, the problem was back.

[hhhd1]

Does your laptop have the nvidia chip ?

if yes, try to go to bios, and set the optimus mode to integrated only, .. see if that makes a difference.

[XE1UFO]

Thanks to all for your kind suggestions!

After leaving the T430 without the main battery overnight, everything came back as if nothing happened. That was several days ago, and no further problems, thank Heaven. I am back up on Linux Mint 17.2 64-bit, and everything seems to work out of the box.

Most honourable user Hhhd1: The lspci -v command returns:

VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 21f3
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 43
Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable)
Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable)
I/O ports at 5000
Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: i915

I would still love to know what caused this situation, so I can avoid it in the future. Did Fedora perhaps send a strange command to the video card and make it burp?

Thanks again.

[Hans Gruber]

Thanks to all for your kind suggestions!

After leaving the T430 without the main battery overnight, everything came back as if nothing happened. That was several days ago, and no further problems, thank Heaven. I am back up on Linux Mint 17.2 64-bit, and everything seems to work out of the box.

Most honourable user Hhhd1: The lspci -v command returns:

VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 21f3
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 43
Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable)
Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable)
I/O ports at 5000
Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: i915

I would still love to know what caused this situation, so I can avoid it in the future. Did Fedora perhaps send a strange command to the video card and make it burp?

Thanks again.

I think you may have a bad monitor cable running to your screen. You may consider replacing the cable for your laptop screen.

[XE1UFO]

I think you may have a bad monitor cable running to your screen. You may consider replacing the cable for your laptop screen.

Thanks for the suggestion, Hans Gruber! Will this one work maybe?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-Orig-IBM-Le ... 19f89e21b8

[Hans Gruber]

I am not an expert in the T430 series thinkpad. Check your Thinkpad type model and go to the HMM tab at the top of the website and look for your model in the .pdf manuals for part number.

You said you just got the T430 and my guess is the LCD cable is bad or not connected properly. You may want to open up your T430 and check to make certain your LCD is connected correctly.