Help! It Freezes

[naryb69]

have an A20m and it freezes on start up. I get the black screen with the Thinkpad logo with "hit F1 for..." and then it stops.

1. No sound other than the fan. Never a beep, burp for anything.

2. When I hit the power button
- a light on the right hinge goes on (looks to be a power/battery indicator)
- 4 of 5 lights on top right of keyboard light up for a moment and then go out(far left does not light)
- of these 4 lights 3 go out leaving only the far right lit
- LCD screene flickers
- LCD screene shows "Thinkpad IBM" with "Press F1...Bios setup" and "Press F12...boot disk" at the bottom.
- the first light of the 5 on top of the keybord (far left - looks to be a HD light)

3. If you do nothing it will stay like this.

4. If you hit the F1 button right after power and keep it depressed you will go to a screene saying BIOS set up but nothing happens.

5. If you hit the F12 button right after power up and keep it depressed you will go to a screen saying Preparing Boot disk but nothing happens.

Hope this helps. I appreciate any and all guidance.

[naryb69]

I'm fining it hard to believe that nobody has an idea.

Come on you guys are SMART!

[FuguTabetai]

I had a similar freezing problem with my A31. It would POST, you could cange BIOS settings, but sometimes it would hard freeze. The power light stayed on, CPU fan stayed on, hardware functions (LCD brightness up/down, ThinkLight, etc) would work, but the machine was frozen. Typically the machine would freeze after booting (into linux, or Windows, didn't matter) but would sometimes freeze at the POST screen.

I think it was a motherboard problem. I bought an A31p used off of ebay, and have retired the A31.

Try running the PC-DOCTOR tools for your laptop and see if it passes all the hardware tests. The CD should be available from IBM/Lenovo (here.)

[tfflivemb2]

If you can get into the BIOS, I would run the full test on everything.

In the even that you can't get into the BIOS, try removing anything and everything that you can (ie. HD, ram, mini-pci cards, CD-rom, etc.) and reboot. If it works, replace the parts one at the time, until you find the cause of the problem.

[AlphaKilo470]

Well, I'm not sure if he can run testsin the BIOS. If his A20m is anything like my A21m, it uses some generic third party BIOS that lacks the diagnostic features that the IBM BIOS on my 600E has.