X230 would not wake up after sleep

[Bondi]

Hi guys.
I'm really annoyed by this problem. My X230 started not to wake up maybe two times out of five after it goes to sleep mode (Fn+F4 or lid closing). I've tried removing Power Manger and also all kinds of power management settings in Windows and BIOS. No change.
When in this non-wakeable state the fan continues to spin, the power button slowly blinks green and the laptop reacts to Fn+Space and changes keyboard backlight brightness. But does not power on if i press the power button.
I can see that it sometimes goes in sleep mode in a kind of a wrong way - very fast, without much disk activity and the fan does not stop. And when it does so it does not wake up.
When it goes to sleep properly, it shows disk activity for maybe 10-15 seconds and fan stops, and then wakes up properly.
Any ideas? Any help or advice is very much appreciated.

[dr_st]

The symptoms you describe suggest a faulty piece of hardware / driver that is preventing that laptop from suspending properly. It does not actually complete the suspend cycle, hence it cannot be woken up.

Next time it gets stuck in this bad state, wait for ~20 minutes and eventually it should crash and turn off. Upon powering it on, you should have a memory dump to analyze. If there is no memory dump, make sure "kernel memory dump" is activated:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... crash-dump

[Bondi]

The symptoms you describe suggest a faulty piece of hardware / driver that is preventing that laptop from suspending properly. It does not actually complete the suspend cycle, hence it cannot be woken up.

Next time it gets stuck in this bad state, wait for ~20 minutes and eventually it should crash and turn off. Upon powering it on, you should have a memory dump to analyze. If there is no memory dump, make sure "kernel memory dump" is activated:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... crash-dump

It doesn't actually crash. The laptop can stay the whole night in this state.
Can it have something to do with a failing HDD? The issue manifested when the system was still on the 500 GIG HDD that started to have some problems (SMART reported some kind of error). I moved to a new SSD, the old HDD is now the secondary disk. But the wake up problem persisted.

[OneByteCPU]

I have customers quite often that have a problem like this. What we have found is that if they put or have the machine go to sleep for a long period of time (length of time varies depending on device and battery condition) and the battery starts to run out, the machine will attempt to hibernate. While copying the system memory and state to disk the power fails completely. Now you have a situation where the system (depending on the actual model) is in a state where only a complete hard reset will get it going again. In this case there are several things you can do to mitigate the problem.

1) Buy a new battery.
2) Avoid sleep as much as possible either through your working habits or through adjusting the power parameters or both.
3) Set your low battery alarms and actions to occur at a much higher percentage of battery remaining.
4) All of the above.

I am not sure this is the problem you are experiencing, but these actions might help.

[Bondi]

I have customers quite often that have a problem like this. What we have found is that if they put or have the machine go to sleep for a long period of time (length of time varies depending on device and battery condition) and the battery starts to run out, the machine will attempt to hibernate. While copying the system memory and state to disk the power fails completely. Now you have a situation where the system (depending on the actual model) is in a state where only a complete hard reset will get it going again. In this case there are several things you can do to mitigate the problem.

1) Buy a new battery.
2) Avoid sleep as much as possible either through your working habits or through adjusting the power parameters or both.
3) Set your low battery alarms and actions to occur at a much higher percentage of battery remaining.
4) All of the above.

I am not sure this is the problem you are experiencing, but these actions might help.

Thank you for the suggestions. I see the point, But I should have mantioned that the laptop was constantly connected to the wall plug. The battery is indeed in poor condition. Yet, I think it should not matter in my case.

[zkmoonea]

do you still have the intel 6205 wifi card in your x230? someone mentioned here that the wifi card could be the culprit: viewtopic.php?t=126049#p843523

[Bondi]

do you still have the intel 6205 wifi card in your x230? someone mentioned here that the wifi card could be the culprit: viewtopic.php?t=126049#p843523

Thanks for the tip! Yes, I have intel 6205. I'll make the changes suggested and see if it helps.

[Bondi]

do you still have the intel 6205 wifi card in your x230? someone mentioned here that the wifi card could be the culprit: viewtopic.php?t=126049#p843523

Changing WiFi card settings did not make any difference in my case. So I decided to apply new thermal paste and clean all cooling system. Hope this will help.

[Bondi]

Just a small update. Repasting seems to have done the trick. No wakeup problems since.

[OneByteCPU]

Repasting? Do you mean cleaning and re-applying the CPU thermal compound (your previous post suggests yes - just clarifying)?

What was the condition of the previous compound application? Was too abundant .. dry .. too little?

What led to this? Did it perform better in colder situations before the re-application?

[Bondi]

Repasting? Do you mean cleaning and re-applying the CPU thermal compound (your previous post suggests yes - just clarifying)?

What was the condition of the previous compound application? Was too abundant .. dry .. too little?

What led to this? Did it perform better in colder situations before the re-application?

Yes, that's right. I changed the thermal paste. And I can confirm that the problem is gone. The previous one was already dry. I also suspect that during previous repasting I forgot one screw that holds the heatsink tight. So probably this also played it's role.

[bgravato]

That's, indeed, a very surprising solution for the problem your reported... I wonder if repasting is what really solved the problem or if perhaps there was some bad connection on a cable or some component that was causing this and opening the laptop, touching parts and especially putting that screw back on is what actually solved it...

I've had my fair share of crazy stories with my X230 as well...

The craziest one was when I thought I bricked it while updating the BIOS firmware... It turned out to be the RAM sticks I had (Samgung) that were incompatible with newer versions of the BIOS firmware. No joking... I bought 2 or 3 used replacement motherboards from ebay and same thing happened with all the boards and I also tried another pair of ram sticks (the same brand and model that I got from a friend) and it was reproducible 100%.
When I put a different RAM stick in the X230 and I saw it booting I couldn't believe my eyes! Then I tried the other motherboards and they were all fine as well! None was bricked...
The Samsung RAM sticks work fine in another laptop. The incompatibility is just with BIOS firmware versions newer that 2.5x (I forgot the exact one, but it was some version between 2.50 and 2.60).