T400 hangs on restart

[acourvil]

My wife was having lots of problems with her T400, so I migrated her to a T450s.

I've rebuilt the T400 and now have only 1 problem: if I try to restart, the system hangs. If I do a full shutdown, it boots fine when restarted. This was true with both Win 7 and now with Win 10. It has the most recent BIOS and a new battery. One USB port (rear right) seems to be non-functional, but it does not appear any of the pins are making contact with anything.

I have a new BIOS battery on the way and will replace it when it arrives. Any ideas on what might be causing the hang on restart? Other than that issue, I have to say it seems like this old T400 actually works very well. But the hang on restart is very annoying when trying to install new software.

[acourvil]

New BIOS battery installed, same issue remains. Seems like it won't quite shut everything down when trying to restart, so the reboot never happens. However, if a full shutdown is initiated, it shuts down just fine.

[Hans Gruber]

Backup your files and reinstall the OS.

[acourvil]

I'll do that when I get some time, but since this behavior also occurs when I boot from a CD w/o using the OS on the hard drive, I am doubtful that it will help.

[rkawakami]

Run the usual diagnostic procedure when faced with some unexpected behavior:

- Remove all removable hardware. This includes memory, hard drive(s), Ultrabay devices, wireless cards, main battery, etc. Using a known good AC adapter, turn on power and expect to get the 1-3-3-1 beep code indicating bad or missing memory. If you get that, continue on as your motherboard is probably mostly good. If no beeps, then your motherboard is likely toast.
- If possible, test all of the memory modules in a known working system using something like memtest86+. If you can't do that, locate a known good memory module (assume for now that your original T400 module(s) could be bad) and install it in your system. If that's not possible, go ahead and try one of your original modules. Boot the system and see if you can at least access BIOS without any problems. If so, boot memtest86+ and verify that whatever memory you have installed in the system is working properly. If you get a 1-3-3-1 beep code or the system acts funny, try moving that module into the other memory slot and try again.
- Assuming that you can get the system properly booting and have verified that the memory contain within is functional (run memtest86+ for at least three complete passes), then begin re-installing hardware ONE piece at a time, re-booting and seeing if the problem returns. I'd start with the wireless cards, mSATA cards and the like, leaving the hard drive as the last piece.
- If you get to the point where the problem re-appears, then the last piece of hardware you put back into the system is likely the issue.

[RealBlackStuff]

If you switch off completely, and then boot from a CD (like Live-Linux), do you still have that problem?
If not, get rid of W10.

Here's a list of supported Lenovo machines: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/docume ... 5#thinkpad
T400 is not on it.

An overview of Lenovo and W10 (good and bad): https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht103822

A list of incompatibilities after installing W10: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht103611
They claim it only concerns Ideapad and Notebook, but who believes Lenovo nowadays?

[acourvil]

Thanks guys. I haven't done the hardware elimination process as rigorously as described by rkawakami, so maybe that's next. I have run diagnostics on everything and haven't found any problems.

This problem exists running Win 7 or Win 10 from the hard drive, and when booting from an old recovery CD with no OS on the hard drive. Based on that, I am pretty sure it is not a Win 10 problem. The problem was there before I did the Win 10 installation.

Although I realize that Win 10 is not officially supported on the T400, it actually seems to work very well so far. But again, the no-restart problem the machine has pre-dates the Win 10 installation.

[Neil]

I'm a little curious about where exactly does the T400 hang during the restart process? Is it while shutting down, or while starting back up? Either way, at what point exactly does it hang? And, is it consistently at the same point every time?

[acourvil]

It seems to hang just before the reboot. Although I haven't figured out a way to log what is happening, it looks like all programs close, the OS shuts down, and the machine just sits there, fan running, without anything restarting.

If someone can point me to a way to log the shutdown process, I can try that and see if I can get more specific info.