Thinkpad T60 SSD upgrade FAIL

[zoltan87]

Why is life so difficult...
I have upgraded my newly bought T60 with a Kingston 240GB SSD, freshly installed Windows 8.1 on it, googled and figured out all the drivers that I needed, I have sorted out the common "no display sign when adjusting volume and brightness" issue, I have spent hours installing all the things that I would need to use. In the process I have restarted multiple times switched it off once or twice, no issues whatsoever. Everything went fine. Then after half a day work I went to have a dinner. And then everything has gone down .

I came back to it and when I tried to switch it on, it just could't boot in to windows. It passes the first part, the windows emblem comes up, those windows dots start to circle in the middle of the screen, then everything just goes black, only the mouse cursor stays on the screen. But it just can't boot in. It even made a single short beep. And that's it. If I push the switch on/off button for a short time, the screen completely switches off, but the computer stays in the same frozen state, doing nothing. Only thing I can do is holding the switch off button for a few seconds, the the system shuts down.

Luckily I still have the original hdd with windows XP on it, so I pulled out the ssd and put the old hdd back to see what will happen. And sure enough, the system boots up just fine.

Then I put the ssd back, but before it tried to initiate loading windows, I pressed f1, and went to bios. My ssd is listed there as it should be. There is a hdd diagnostic tool in bios, I run that and this was the result:

Status: Test complete
Result: Pass: Read verification and speed test

After this, the only option is to press Enter, and return to the BIOS. So I did that. Looking around, I figured there was not much else there that I could do, so I exit the BIOS and did a restart. And here is the funny part: IT BOOTED UP AND SUCCESSFULLY LOADED WINDOWS!!!

By this point I had no idea what was going on so did a restart quickly, to see what will happen. And the nightmare was back . The same issue, tries to load windows, then one beep, screen goes black, mouse cursor on the screen, and nothing changes after this, it stays like that. Only thing I can do is keep pressing the switch off button for like 5 seconds to switch the [censored] thing off.

I would be extremely grateful, if someone could give me some advice/ direction, what I should look for, or try out, as at this point I have no idea what is wrong.

[RealBlackStuff]

1) Kingston SSD is wrong in general, they're on the same crap-level as OCZ, and yours is most likely also TLC...
2) W8.1 is wrong for your T60. IMHO the max. there is W7/32-bit.

[ajkula66]

I would be extremely grateful, if someone could give me some advice/ direction, what I should look for, or try out, as at this point I have no idea what is wrong.

First things first: secure erase the drive using Parted Magic. You do NOT need to Google for drivers. W8 will have all of them, apart from possibly graphics driver but that's the least of your worries right now. Babysit the machine while the installation is going on so you can possibly react to something/anything gong haywire.

Good luck.

[zoltan87]

Well, It kept doing it's strange behaviour, I could load windows like 1 out of every 4 tries, so I decided to wipe the whole thing and reinstall windows 8.1 completely. Will see how things turn out.

I am aware that Kingston is not the most reliable brand in SSDs, but I paid for £45 for a brand new 240 gb ssdNow 300 V.

Also, even though Windows 8.1 managed most of the drivers, the middle button on the clcik pad wasn't working (couldn't scroll up and down), the different adjusting keys (volume, thinklight, wifi switch on/off button etc.) were not displaying anything on the screen, and also the Ati Radeon x1400 drivers were missing, so I had to sort those things out. But I also installed a few extra stuff (ThinkVantage something, Improved USB keyboard adapter etc). Thinking back, maybe these additional extra drivers broke something.

Anyway will do it again, hopefully things will stay usable this time.

[zoltan87]

Well, I managed to reinstall everything, and did some testing before I installed the Ati x1400 drivers. And it turns out those drivers are the ones causing the problems.

Also that black screen problem is really a screen issue, meaning the screen is black with only the mouse cursor on it, but the windows prompt that asks for password is still there, it is just not being displayed. I know this because just for a test on that black screen, I pressed space (to bring up the password prompt) typed in my password (doing this all blindly, as nothing was displayed), then pressed enter. I could hear from the changing fan noise, and see from the flashing hdd led under the screen, that something was happening, the laptop was doing something, I just couldn't see it. So then after I waited for like 20 seconds, I pressed the turn off button, which is set to put the computer into sleep mode. Then I woke it up, and guess what, the screen came back to life .

After all this, I deleted the Ati drivers, and no issues so far. Problem is, the computer is really slow with the basic Windows video driver.

So what I would like to ask is, if anyone has a source for a version of the Ati x1400 driver, that is known to be stable on Windows 7/ 8.1 64 bit, please could you share it with me. My version was this: 8.383.1.1-070621a-049739C-Lenovo September 4, 2007
Also, during installation of this driver, the first screen showed Lenovo Japan, not sure that there could be some problem because of localization?

[RealBlackStuff]

Check the Drivers link (at the top of this page) for T60/p display drivers.
We have them all.

[ajkula66]

Also, during installation of this driver, the first screen showed Lenovo Japan, not sure that there could be some problem because of localization?

No. Many drivers were developed by Lenovo's Japanese division and that in itself is definitely not a problem.

[danikayser84]

I did try a 60GB Kingston SSD in my T60 and it would always fail on a warm reboot and not be detected by a BIOS (it was always detected after a cold reboot or resume from sleep/hibernate however)

I usually just use SanDisk SSDs (haven't had any issues with them on either my Z60m, T60, T61 or T500), also tried PNY in my Mid-2008 MacBook (seems fine for now but haven't run it long enough)

I'd recommend staying away from Kingston at least on earlier SATA ThinkPads due to the issue I stated earlier

[ajkula66]

I did try a 60GB Kingston SSD in my T60 and it would always fail on a warm reboot and not be detected by a BIOS (it was always detected after a cold reboot or resume from sleep/hibernate however)

Ah the wonders of SandForce controllers... ...the very reason someone I've got three kids with and who's been using ThinkPads since mid-90s absolutely refuses to move to SSD to this very day...

[jaspen-meyer]

I would be extremely grateful, if someone could give me some advice/ direction, what I should look for, or try out, as at this point I have no idea what is wrong.

The operating system is designed to be a hassle. If you are not bound to a program which only runs on ms windows, try Linux Mint. You'll be up and running in 15 minuets and everything'll work.

[zoltan87]

I would be extremely grateful, if someone could give me some advice/ direction, what I should look for, or try out, as at this point I have no idea what is wrong.

The operating system is designed to be a hassle. If you are not bound to a program which only runs on ms windows, try Linux Mint. You'll be up and running in 15 minuets and everything'll work.

Haha, it's funny you mentioned this, because this is almost exactly what has happened. Only I ended up trying out Ubuntu Mate. I was hesitating between Linux Mint and Ubuntu Mate, but ended up with Ubuntu. But before that, on Windows I was wrestling with the Ati driver for some time, uninstalled it, but for some reason then couldn't install it again, at about 90 % the progress bar kept freezing. I threw out like an hour with that thing, trying to find all the files etc that it left behind after uninstalling it, as I think something left over was causing the issue. But I just fed up with the whole thing, and because I was thinking about making a dual boot system anyway with Linux, I figured I will just leave out Windows all together (I have a desktop pc with windows for heavier CAD work).

And so far Ubuntu has been flawless, everything working as it would be expected. It's absolutely astounding, how heavily you can customize this OS, from panel style, location, icons, bar widths in pixels, transparency, color, animation style, fonts, work spaces, just absolutely EVERYTHING. It's so adjustable that it's actually scary, haha. Also I checked that blender and FreeCAD are available for Ubuntu, so will check them out, they might will turn out to be good programs for my needs.

So yeah, extremely happy with Ubuntu Mate so far, only thing I still need to figure out is, how to show onscreen display icons when I adjust the volume/ screen brightness and turn on the thinklight. In windows there was a workaround, but I still need to read after this on Ubuntu.

[jaspen-meyer]

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install xbacklight
xbacklight
xbacklight -set 0
xbacklight -set 50
xbacklight -set 100

Can do the same thing with sound:

amixer set Master [some number between 0 - 65536]

Here's a script to set output volume as a percentage. Say you save it as volume.sh, then run 'chmod +x volume.sh'
you could set volume to 50% with './volume.sh 50'

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
amixer set Master `echo "$1 * 655.36 "|bc`
echo `echo "$1`

[zoltan87]

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install xbacklight
xbacklight
xbacklight -set 0
xbacklight -set 50
xbacklight -set 100

Can do the same thing with sound:

amixer set Master [some number between 0 - 65536]

Here's a script to set output volume as a percentage. Say you save it as volume.sh, then run 'chmod +x volume.sh'
you could set volume to 50% with './volume.sh 50'

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
amixer set Master `echo "$1 * 655.36 "|bc`
echo `echo "$1`

Thank you for your help. I am afraid I am still VERY beginner in Linux, and I am just too afraid to start poke around in the terminal, and what not. But I have saved your comment as a text file, and when I will get more comfortable doing general things in Ubuntu, I will try it out. It definitely seems like a pretty steep learning curve for someone, who is used to just clicking on buttons to install and adjust things,

[jaspen-meyer]

oops, I had a typo in there! was missing a " here
echo `echo "$1`

corrected:

#!/bin/bash
amixer set Master `echo "$1 * 655.36 " | bc`
echo `echo "$1"`

[ji2o0k]

hey there, thought I would share in case this information would be helpful to you....

I installed Win10 Pro 64bit on a T60 (8741-CTO) - installed 4GB DDR2 ram and using a Samsung Pro 840 256SSD...

Everything is working fine -I had some difficulties with the ATI X1400 drivers - ended up using the Vista 64bit display drivers and installing via Compatability mode (and it worked).

I also flashed the BIOS removing the whitelist and installed a Intel N card (bios found here - had to flash via Windows 32bit first - what a pain):
https://forums.mydigitallife.info/threa ... post814979

So far so good! Everything is working well....only thing is that CPU usage is a bit high with the ntoskrnl causing some spikes and high RAM usage (approx. 40% constant).....

[SaskFellow]

I did try a 60GB Kingston SSD in my T60 and it would always fail on a warm reboot and not be detected by a BIOS (it was always detected after a cold reboot or resume from sleep/hibernate however)

Ah the wonders of SandForce controllers... ...the very reason someone I've got three kids with and who's been using ThinkPads since mid-90s absolutely refuses to move to SSD to this very day...

I've got an Adata Premier 510 120GB SSD with a SandForce controller and it's been stable and quick the two years it's been in a Sony YB lappy and it's got a horrible AMD chipset.

There were some really bad implementations but Sandforce was a definite step forward from what came before. Intel also uses them in their consumer grade SSDs, and I've not heard too many gripes about reliability there. Installed many 3** series in Windows and OSX machines.

[ajkula66]

I've got an Adata Premier 510 120GB SSD with a SandForce controller and it's been stable and quick the two years it's been in a Sony YB lappy and it's got a horrible AMD chipset.

Good for you.

There were some really bad implementations but Sandforce was a definite step forward from what came before. Intel also uses them in their consumer grade SSDs, and I've not heard too many gripes about reliability there. Installed many 3** series in Windows and OSX machines.

Intel had developed their own custom firmware for SF-based drives, which still performed poorly when it came to non-compressed writes. No ifs, ands or buts there.

As for the SF being a step forward...yes, in the respect of pricing. No in all other respects. They have proven to be the most unstable and problematic controllers to be found on SSDs. Internet is a chock full of horror stories that no other controller managed to match to this very day.

Personally, while I'm disappointed that even Intel is moving to TLC NAND (ugh), I'm happy to see that most of the manufacturers who were holding onto SF for dear life like Mushkin are now finally dropping it.

[Shredder11]

I've got three Intel SF type drives and yes they are much slower for write speeds, but have generally been reliable so far. I'm currently thinking about moving those drives into my Windows XP Pro machines, because of the Intel Toolbox that helps with ongoing maintenance. At the moment a couple of those drives are in Windows 7 Pro machines, which I feel is a waste due to Win 7 having built-in SSD drive management.

[SaskFellow]

I've got an Adata Premier 510 120GB SSD with a SandForce controller and it's been stable and quick the two years it's been in a Sony YB lappy and it's got a horrible AMD chipset.

Good for you.

There were some really bad implementations but Sandforce was a definite step forward from what came before. Intel also uses them in their consumer grade SSDs, and I've not heard too many gripes about reliability there. Installed many 3** series in Windows and OSX machines.

Intel had developed their own custom firmware for SF-based drives, which still performed poorly when it came to non-compressed writes. No ifs, ands or buts there.

As for the SF being a step forward...yes, in the respect of pricing. No in all other respects. They have proven to be the most unstable and problematic controllers to be found on SSDs. Internet is a chock full of horror stories that no other controller managed to match to this very day.

Personally, while I'm disappointed that even Intel is moving to TLC NAND (ugh), I'm happy to see that most of the manufacturers who were holding onto SF for dear life like Mushkin are now finally dropping it.

It is, because the Fiancé would kill me if her school computer croaked unexpectedly.

Sandforce was very sensitive to it's implementation. It also was very reliant on manufacturers to actually give a hoot in regards to firmware. Most of the Sandforce horror stories are from OCZ and crummy brands, but yes there were firmware issues, even the Intel drives of legend had some bad firmware.

I agree, the Sandforce series we know and hate, have lived long past their due date. It was a design decision that made Sandforce SSD's cheap to build and suck with compressible data. For most consumer users it was a fair trade off, most use the drives in mostly compensable data. The interesting part though is that when the company invests in tuning the firmware and enabling the various maintenance stuff Sandforce was stable and even with compressed data, much quicker than any HDD.

The move to TLC is needed for capacities at prices that will entice the vast majority of people, and when done right TLC is really fast. The 850 Evo is faster than the Pro and significantly cheaper, for the price of my 850 Pro, I was within spitting distance of the 1TB Eva that creams my Pro in speed, but I wanted a more stable drive, and the Pro uses a little less power.

Firmware hell is when you have an 840 Evo that overheats and constantly locks up in ultrabooks, Samsung released a firmware fix 6 months after I had to buy a Pro to replace it for a customer, because it was corrupting their data. That sucks... lol

Not all Sandforce drives are bad, but like with anything, technology moves on and SSD controller tech definitely has.

[Johan]

@ zoltan87:

Quick question; how have you configured your SSD to operate, in the BIOS-settings; as "Compatibility" or as AHCI?

Johan

[thinkpadcollection]

One data point on T60 with SSD, samsung 850 EVO 250GB works.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[zoltan87]

@ zoltan87:

Quick question; how have you configured your SSD to operate, in the BIOS-settings; as "Compatibility" or as AHCI?

Johan

Uh, I didn't do any configuration in BIOS...should I have it? I just put the SSD in the machine, made a bootable Ubuntu Mate 16.04 pendrive, set the boot order in the BIOS of the T60 to boot from inserted usb media and that was it. With Ubuntu it was really straight forward everything after that. I have I haven't missed any steps.

Also I managed to flash the BIOS with no whitelist, at least I think it is fine. I am still waiting for the new wifi pci-e card. I guess I will find it out when I will have it installed.

I am loving it so far, in Ubuntu everything works fine, and it's pretty responsible too. I use Opera browser, I can't believe I haven't tried it before, only on my phone. It blocks ads on web pages and on Youtube by default, it's amazing. Also really quick. Really the only time when I feel that it's a 10 year old computer is when I play full HD videos on youtube. It just can't handle it. 720p is fine though. Also, downloaded videos in vlc play just fine, even in full HD.

One thing I don't like, is the fact that it is quite noisy, I will definitely mod the cooling in the future. I am thinking about making a custom solution, I have seen many of these copper heat pipes with cooling fluid in them on Aliexpress (same stuff they use in factory laptop coolers, they just bend them to required shape). I am even thinking about putting an extra fan with cooling fins into the expresscard slot, as it is just there being completely empty, and routing a heat pipe out there (although for that I will probably need to do some cutting on the frame). But it's for the future, I am quite happy as of now.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

Most people recommend setting SATA mode to AHCI when running an SSD. I don't think that would cause the boot problems you experienced, though maybe. It'd be worth trying.

The problem you were having sounds a lot like a problem I run into whenever I try to boot from a second hard drive in the UltraBay. The drive won't cold boot, but if I go into BIOS and then exit it will usually boot fine. Think the drive is taking too long to initialize, so the BIOS doesn't find it and errors out. If you decide to move Ubuntu from USB to the SSD, the problem will most likely come back. One workaround might be turning off the quick boot option in BIOS so that it checks the memory at boot. By the time that's finished the SSD should be initialized.

As for fan noise, T60s have really terrible fan management. I don't know what the deal is, but for some reason letting the BIOS control the fan results a loud high RPM fan but the temperatures aren't any cooler. Install thinkfan (with lm-sensors) and set up a custom fan profile. After that, your T60 should be cool and quiet without even installing a new heatsink.

[zoltan87]

Most people recommend setting SATA mode to AHCI when running an SSD. I don't think that would cause the boot problems you experienced, though maybe. It'd be worth trying.

The problem you were having sounds a lot like a problem I run into whenever I try to boot from a second hard drive in the UltraBay. The drive won't cold boot, but if I go into BIOS and then exit it will usually boot fine. Think the drive is taking too long to initialize, so the BIOS doesn't find it and errors out. If you decide to move Ubuntu from USB to the SSD, the problem will most likely come back. One workaround might be turning off the quick boot option in BIOS so that it checks the memory at boot. By the time that's finished the SSD should be initialized.

As for fan noise, T60s have really terrible fan management. I don't know what the deal is, but for some reason letting the BIOS control the fan results a loud high RPM fan but the temperatures aren't any cooler. Install thinkfan (with lm-sensors) and set up a custom fan profile. After that, your T60 should be cool and quiet without even installing a new heatsink.

Well the thing is, I have installed Ubuntu on the SSD already, and it works just fine. That boot up error really only occured on Windows 8.1 after installing the Ati x1400 driver (before the driver installation, Windows was booting up fine). So I am 99% sure my issue was with the Ati driver combined with Win 8.1.

In Ubuntu everything is fine since installation.

The temperatures seem to be quite low, I think the issue is, it ramps up the RPM too much without any reason. I installed Pfsensor to monitor the temps, and the max was 54 Celsius (when browsing and watching 720p youtube video). I remember having a macbook pro 13inch 2009 model a while ago, and that was usually really quiet, but it let the machine go into the 70s (in Celsius) then it started to turn up the fans. I remember it was in the 80 degrees quite a lot. I am not saying that is a good thing (I am quite sure that's too high for extended use, nonetheless that machine worked fine for 4 years, then eventually I sold it). But the fan control on my Thinkpad T60 seems to be way too much on the safe side. Although there might will be some change after I will change the pci-e wifi card in it, as I read that the one that it uses tends to get really hot when streaming videos. So that could help somewhat too.

[zoltan87]

Just thought I will come back for a final comment regarding my screen issue. I have completely managed to solve it on Windows 8.1, so it was definitely not an SSD issue, as expected it was caused because of dodgy driver behaviour under Win 8.1. The main thing I had to do was, in "shut down settings" I had to un-check the "turn on fast start up" option. This has eliminated any black screen issues.

Here is a link for the full driver installation process:
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T ... -p/3357286

So now I have a perfectly functional Thinkpad T60 with Win 8.1 and Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on it. Perfection. Only thing, the on screen displayed icons are not on (for volume adjustment, brightness etc.) but honestly it doesn't bother me, and I don't want to mess around any more, risking of breaking some driver again.

[ji2o0k]

Just thought I will come back for a final comment regarding my screen issue. I have completely managed to solve it on Windows 8.1, so it was definitely not an SSD issue, as expected it was caused because of dodgy driver behaviour under Win 8.1. The main thing I had to do was, in "shut down settings" I had to un-check the "turn on fast start up" option. This has eliminated any black screen issues.

Here is a link for the full driver installation process:
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T ... -p/3357286

So now I have a perfectly functional Thinkpad T60 with Win 8.1 and Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on it. Perfection. Only thing, the on screen displayed icons are not on (for volume adjustment, brightness etc.) but honestly it doesn't bother me, and I don't want to mess around any more, risking of breaking some driver again.

Thx for this.....your post just jogged my memory that I was also experiencing some issues with my Dad's T60...startup was fine but when it went to sleep...I was having issues with the display and it was only showing the cursor..

I did exactly what you mentioned above (disable fast startup) and it resolved the issue.

Thx for the post, I would have totally forgotten this fix...good for future reference!

[Raidriar]

I personally used the Intel X25-E 64GB version without issue in my T60P.