T42p shuts down under load

[burntyellow]

I need your experienced help. These are the symptoms:

1. With AC plugged in. When restoring to factory state, the restore process initiates with copying of files to hard drive but laptop shuts down abruptly at the start of the processing stage. I think the hard drive spins up at this stage or perhaps it was the fan that I was hearing taking off.

2. Only on battery. I was able to get the restore process much further along but it did not complete. Again there was an abrupt power off.

3. Set CPU to low performance in the bios. The restore completed but after I reset CPU throttle in the bios and restarted with AC, I experienced abrupt power off again ... I suppose it was under load conditions because I hear the fan.

Question: Has the motherboard gone bad? I have spare T42 and T43 boards; these have the discrete graphics. Will these boards be sufficient to drive the UXGA display, which is still in nice condition.

Thanks.

[TPFanatic]

How hot does the laptop get, and how hot is the air blowing out?

This is for the T42p experts, does 400 MHz fsb Dothan have a thermal shutoff switch? Shutting off under load, and lasting longer under lightened CPU settings sounds consistent with thermal issues. Or the CPU is a dud.

[brchan]

I had a very similar issue with a new heatsink + fan I bought for my T43. The fan would spin up super loud, but there wouldn't be much hot air blowing out, even though the area under the heatsink was very hot. A few minutes later it would shut down due to 100C+ temps. I fixed it by replacing the thermal pad on the gpu area with thermal paste.

This sounds like a different problem though. If the problem suddenly appeared, maybe heatsink pipe failure? A bad fan will cause problems, but shouldn't increase temps so drastically. You might try reseating the heatsink.

[GomJabbar]

Sure sounds like an overheating problem to me. Seen similar behavior on my T42 (which was fixed under warranty by replacing the fan and thermal pad). CPU shuts down around 100 deg. C.. If your fan is turning ok, make sure the exhaust port is not plugged up. As brchan suggested above, you may need to replace the thermal pad to get better heat transfer from the CPU to the heatsink.

[burntyellow]

I seem to recall testing the temperature of CPU and GPU using tpfancontrol and the S&M Stress Tests from HBCD. This was for case 3 where I was able to do the factory restore followed by resetting the CPU throttling in the Bios. The temperature was in the 66 or so but nothing approaching 100. Also, I did clean off the fan assembly and apply AS5 to CPU; GPU thermal pad looked OK.

I had the nagging feeling that the power off happens when the drive spins up? I used a different drive and got similar symptoms. Does HBCD have a temp monitor that I can run at the same time as S&M Stress Tests. Since now that I don't have a working OS on the hard drive, I will need to boot from HBCD.

[RealBlackStuff]

Just in case, do you use a 56W or 72W charger?
And T4x have been infamous for Southbridge coming "unsoldered" (Intel chip under the wifi card).
Those get quite warm as well.

[burntyellow]

72W (FRU: 08K8205). 16V 4.5A output. Yep, I've read on the forum about the Southbridge going south but was not sure if it will manifest in this way.

[ajkula66]

It's either a heatsink that's not sitting quite right - which would be an easy fix - or one of the sensors on the board gone wacky where you'll likely end up scrapping the board.

Boot a "live" Linux CD/DVD/USB and let the machine run for a while, as in a couple of hours if possible. Report back.

Good luck.

[Khipata]

I second ajkula66-s advice.

[burntyellow]

I am unable to boot CentOS 6 Live CD/DVD. I only see the initial CentOS splash screen and then everything freezes. If I push on keys eventually that would produce a beep for each key stroke. Also, the very top 2 or 3 lines of pixels on the splash screen are garbled. GPU failure?

I can boot into Mini Windows XP in HBCD fine; so is it not using the discrete graphics? I also found that only one of my USB thumb drives was recognized as bootable. Presumably this one is USB 1 and the others are 2 or above?

[ajkula66]

I am unable to boot CentOS 6 Live CD/DVD. I only see the initial CentOS splash screen and then everything freezes.

That should not be the case. Have you tried another distro? Or ran Memtest 86 by any chance?

Also, the very top 2 or 3 lines of pixels on the splash screen are garbled. GPU failure?

Not necessarily. I've seen stuff like that on perfectly healthy units during various *nix installs.

Presumably this one is USB 1 and the others are 2 or above?

T4x systems were all equipped with USB 2.0...

[RealBlackStuff]

If that machine now works at USB1.1 speed, then the Southbridge is definitely bad.
It should be USB2.0

[burntyellow]

Scratch my comments regarding the USB thumb drives. It turns out that the drive that can boot is USB2. I know (reproducible) that there are some drives that will boot fine on my T6x but not on the T4x. It might be something different with the USB sticks ... I got a bunch free at the supercomputing conference.

I did boot into Knoppix 7.6 fine. I left it alone for an hour; screensave triggered; when I checked an hour later, there was significant CPU load shown by the ribbon monitor and htop. Fan was running fine and the machine was hot but not excessively hot. However when I tar xzf a package from the net, the laptop abruptly powered off.

Lastly, I did run MemTest86+ from HBCD and memory is good. After the laptop cycled off, some times I cannot get the Thinkpad boot screen; the fan would run but the screen is dark. If I unplug (no battery attached), hit the power button a few times, plug back in, the boot process would be good.

[ajkula66]

You may want to open up the machine again and verify that the heatsink is properly seated, without any gaps in the CPU/GPU areas. If all of that looks OK, I'm afraid that you might just have to consider swapping the planar.

Good luck.

[TPFanatic]

Opening up the T42p is pretty easy. It's from the era of IBM laptops where they mark the screw lengths and what they hold down. Unscrew all the marked Screw 1, Screw 2, and Screw 3 screws to lift off the palmrest and keyboard. Keyboard is a pain in the back of the torso to lift out of the palmrest, so it's easier to take them out together - you may need to do that anyway to lift out and inspect the heatsink.

If reapplying thermal paste, put a thin layer that covers the entire CPU die. If the heatsink has a thermal pad for the GPU, you can consider whether to remove it and layer the GPU cap with thermal paste as well. The pad may be useless by now. Screw down the heatsink securely so it is pressed down on the CPU and GPU.

[Flynn]

try to work on power but with battery removed. and get back to us with results

[burntyellow]

Some kind of progress but no success:

I replaced the CPU with one from a T43 and am happy to report that the restore to Win XP worked. I was able to upgrade to the latest drivers and XP updates. tpfc reports temperatures to be less than 60 even when running BurnInTest. Overall, super happy.

However when attempting to set up Win 7 in dual boot mode, the sporadic power off returned. Installation of Win 7 was a success. But attempting to do Windows Update causes the power cycle to happen. Afterwards, the power button would not cycle through the boot process; the fan turns on and you see the power indicator light but no boot process; you need to yank out the power cord while the T42p was "on" before the power cycle would proceed through the boot process on the next power button press. The bottom line is that attempts to update Win 7 lead to abrupt shut off.

Now, I booted back to the Win XP partition and ran BurnInTest. Win XP is stable. I left the laptop on over 24 hours; still stable. So I am at a loss as to what else to do other than to replace the planar with a spare T42 or T43 board. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks.

[RealBlackStuff]

A T43 (FSB 533Mhz) CPU does NOT belong in a T42 (FSB 400MHz) motherboard, even if they have the same pin-layout.
I'm surprised that it even runs as you describe.

[MrMaguire]

I've noticed that dedicated GPUs in old laptops run hotter under Windows Vista / 7 than they do with XP. Perhaps your burn-in test was successful because the GPU didn't reach its thermal threshold.

I agree with a few other people here in thinking that there is something not quite right with the way the heatsink is sitting on the GPU.

[burntyellow]

After messing around extensively, I've concluded that the planar was bad. I swapped it out with one from a T43 and the machine is now running happily: triple boot XP, W7, and W10 ... with none of the prior frustration with power cutting out during the OS installation/update. The temp readings are slightly higher than what I was getting from the T42p but overall it's a nice machine with a great display. Now, to clean it up a bit more and then forget it in a file cabinet to age

Thanks for everyone's pointers.