T510 died suddenly - it looks like EC flash or BIOS issue

[Brane212]

Thing just died overnight. There was nothing, not even lights on control keys during power-up, but it seems that basic blocks were working, since system would beep 1-3-3-1 when I tried to boot it without RAM sticks.

I have downloaded schematics and tried to find my way through it. At first I thought that some fuse might have gone off, since neither LEDs on keyboard nor backlight or vent would ever activate, but soon I discounted that possibility. Now it seems EC (R4F212 H8S microcontroller) is numb. Not exactly dead, since its oscillator works, but all of its signals seem to be inactive.

I tried to drive e.g power_led or capslock_led signals manually (tying the pin to gnd on microcontroller) and sure enough, LED would light.

It looks almost as if something was borked within BIOS or EC chip FLASH, unfortunately I don't have the binary files to reFLASH chips manually and so far I did not manage to extract them from lenovo's FLASH update CD.

I also tried magic sequence of repressing power button 10 x 1 sec + 30 sec with all batteries removed, but that did not work either.

Any ideas would be welcome.

[MikalE]

Sorry to hear that. I got nuthin' besides this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-T510-T510i- ... SwU-pXrd6B

For a cost of somewhere between $20 and $40 USD it isn't worth the time to troubleshoot.

[Cigarguy]

Not that easy if you're in Slovenia. You do realize that not everyone here is in the USA? Besides cost of the MB there's the $43. 72 US in shipping. Then there's no guarantee that it will clear customs without issue or even get to destination. What happens if the board is DOA? Another $100 US in shipping, hassle and time.

In some circumstances it's worth going through a little bit of trouble to diagnose and troubleshoot. Worst case is a MB replacement which in this situation it sounds like it very well may be. If one was living in the US this would be a no brainer, cheap and easy.

[Brane212]

Yeah, there is that. Plus, it often pays if one has additional control over HW.

I was toying with Coreboot for some time and would love to have custom BIOS for my HW, whatever that might be.

Also, having access to internal HW could open veryy interesting new possibilities. Like having custom LCD or CPU that would otherwise be prohibited by BIOS or extra large battery or something entirely different.

There is not that much difference between Thinikpad generations, so good parts of such solutions for T510 would be applicable also for previous or next generation.

I have also one W500 that is waiting for the MP1010B chip that is in backlight electronics. I would love to see for example if i could:

- 3Dprint extralarge battery cartridge, for say 15 or 18 good cells
- replace original old WUXGA TN screen with something newer, brighter, IPS or VA-based, parhaps with higher resolution
- route connections to secondary battery externally for use as extra, larger external box with many cells.
- have open sourced BIOS without extra crap

I've downloaded datasheet from NEC for H8S and I think I'll have the route for accessing EC firmware soon. Or at least route to prgoram chip with new content.

I've opened boot CD and now I'm looking at DOS executables and files. It shouldn't be too hard to figure what they do.
It's a shame I've never done flashrom -r on working machine to archive working BIOS.

It would be totally cool to open this machine.

I should have BIOS flash content read in 30 minutes, then we'll take it from there... )

[MikalE]

Not that easy if you're in Slovenia. You do realize that not everyone here is in the USA? Besides cost of the MB there's the $43. 72 US in shipping. Then there's no guarantee that it will clear customs without issue or even get to destination. What happens if the board is DOA? Another $100 US in shipping, hassle and time.

In some circumstances it's worth going through a little bit of trouble to diagnose and troubleshoot. Worst case is a MB replacement which in this situation it sounds like it very well may be. If one was living in the US this would be a no brainer, cheap and easy.

Yep, I realize all of that, but what is his time worth, against the value of the system? I order a lot from overseas and generally shipping is around $30 for just about anything up to 10 pounds that would fit in a box about the size of that MB.

And yes it would suck if it was DOA, but you take that chance anywhere.

Maybe cheaper to just buy another T510 and sell the other T510 for parts and try to recoup some of the money for the new T510.

No easy answers for someone overseas.

[MisterB]

I also tried magic sequence of repressing power button 10 x 1 sec + 30 sec with all batteries removed, but that did not work either.

Any ideas would be welcome.

Was the BIOS battery removed? Simply removing the BIOS battery and forcing a hard reset of all BIOS settings fixed both a W500 and W700 that wouldn't post. The W500 was completely dead with no beeps and no lights after a BIOS flash. The W700 was giving the beep pattern that indicated a bad motherboard but it posted to BIOS after I removed the battery.

[Brane212]

Was the BIOS battery removed? Simply removing the BIOS battery and forcing a hard reset of all BIOS settings fixed both a W500 and W700 that wouldn't post. The W500 was completely dead with no beeps and no lights after a BIOS flash. The W700 was giving the beep pattern that indicated a bad motherboard but it posted to BIOS after I removed the battery.

Yes, I did that. I removed all batteries ( including internal cell for BIOS).

[jaspen-meyer]

It's a shame I've never done flashrom -r on working machine to archive working BIOS.

The chipset of a T510 isn't supported by flashrom. This is the message you get when flashrom tried reading bios on an unsupported system:

Code: Select all

sudo flashrom -p internal -f -r x61s.rom

flashrom v0.9.9-r1954
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
========================================================================
WARNING! You seem to be running flashrom on an unsupported laptop.
Laptops, notebooks and netbooks are difficult to support and we
recommend to use the vendor flashing utility. The embedded controller
(EC) in these machines often interacts badly with flashing.
See the manpage and https://flashrom.org/Laptops for details.

If flash is shared with the EC, erase is guaranteed to brick your laptop
and write may brick your laptop.
Read and probe may irritate your EC and cause fan failure, backlight
failure and sudden poweroff.
You have been warned.
========================================================================
Aborting.
Error: Programmer initialization failed.

[Brane212]

Well, it fumbles now on all of my other machines, too.

It says that it detects that IMC is active and refuses to access FLASH.

I have on couple of my machines BIOS chip removed, soldered DIP-8 socket on a bit of a strip cable that leads onto front plate, where it's glued, so I can easily remove/replace it and read/write/verify it.

It has been great tool for repairs and play but now it refuses to work. FLASHROM refuses to write to FLASH and even access T510's BIOS chip.
It should support it ( flashrom -L lists it as supported), but when i do flashrom -p internal -c 25L6445E ) it says it never heard for such chip. WTF.

NOW might be a good time to finally do some LPT programming and cobble up NOR serial FLASH chip programmer and stop [censored] around with (too) ad-hoc solutions.

Well, I managed to fumble ICH chip when deslodering ( one of the temp sensors and one heater was disconnected), so temp profile was so heavilly f***d up that I smoked the [censored] thing.

But I will read that BIOS and probably that 1kbit serial EEPROM. And EC, it would be shame to throw it away.

As for MoBo replacement, I don't know. I might, but only thing worth my time would be good old wokrstation W500. It has that great 16:9 screen ratio and it is just powerfull enough for my needs. And, its keyboard is head and shoulders abuve everything else non-Thinkpad. W700 is kind of big and energy heavy and rare in EU, similar Dells have inferior keyboard ( and are rare within EU), everything else thinkPad has that faggoty wide screen and/or is much more expensive.

I'll play with T500/W500.