Dead T20. It don't look good!

[Rex]

Hi there,

These days, I only use my T20 for watching DVD's. Usually run it with the power cord and close down by shutting the lid and putting into Standby.

Plugged in last night, opened the lid, and zilch. Nothing starts. Battery light is green and blinking and hd activity light flashes for about a millisecond. Changed battery, held down power button, still zilch.

There had been no indication of any going wrong the night before.

Grateful for any suggestions, or do I have a nice paperweight?

Many thanks,

Rex

[rkawakami]

This sounds like the typical symptom for the "blink of death". The HD LED flashes (once) when the power button is depressed, no other sounds or indication of life, correct?

One of the "normal" solutions is to pull all sources of power, main battery, CMOS backup battery and AC and leave it like that for a couple of days before trying to power it up again. Sometimes this works. I have a T21 and T22 with this problem and have been attempting to work on them from time to time. The T21 has never powered up the couple of weeks I've had it. The T22 has come to life several times in the 5 or so months it's been in my hands. The other thing that I've heard "works" is removing power, pushing the power button many times (20-30) and then holding it for 20-30 seconds.

Not quite sure about your description of plugging it in last night. Was the system previously in a standby state (and if so, how long)? If it wasn't, then was it hibernating or fully shut down? Also, was there any recent movement of the laptop, specifically, being lifted by a corner or an abrupt contact with something (a euphemistic way of asking if it was dropped )?

Inquiring minds would like to know....

[Rex]

Ray,

Thanks for your reply. No, the T20 was not dropped, and it was not connected to the power whilst in Standby.

After use, I always disconnect it and close the lid which is set to Standby. If it is not fired up within a few days, the battery does not maintain Standby and I have to do a normal, power button boot.

When I use Standby, I usually only do it a few times as I have found that everything works better if the everything is 'flushed' by switching off and re-booting.

Have been tweaking the Standby button, but don't think that is the problem.

Will try removing all the bits you suggest.

Rex

[rkawakami]

FLASH! I just took the T21 out from it's ziplock bag (that's how it was shipped to me), plugged in the AC adapter, pushed the power button.... and..... "blink". It's been sitting, without any power for at least two weeks. There is no hard drive, but it has one 256MB stick of memory and a DVD drive.

That's not the important news. I removed the AC adapter and tried the multiple presses of the power button, holding it down and then plugged the adapter back in. Still nothing.

Then, I decided to perform the multiple power press WITH the AC adapter plugged in and the system powered up! Twice!. This particular T21 has a bad backlight in the LCD so I could not tell if the system POSTed. So, I attached an external monitor, but I've only been able to get it to turn on one more time. No video signal was going out the external VGA port as far as I could tell. The Fn+F7 sequence didn't do anything. I've also been torquing the case around the PCMCIA card cage and this may also help in getting the system to power up but I can't say for sure this is helping for this particular unit. I do have two T23s that have an occasional problem in fully turning on. They do not exhibit the "blink of death", but do power up with the fan spinning for a few seconds and usually with the IBM splash screen (sometimes not), but proceed no further. When I apply upward pressure underneath the PCMCIA card and a downward force on the top of the front left corner, the power on problem goes away. I am attributing this to a loose/broken connection on the motherboard.

I really can't recommend trying to revive a system this way, as the power "pulses" may end up doing more harm than good. But it IS an interesting piece to this puzzle.

(edit: Must be my lucky night... I took the T22 out from under the desk where it's been for two (?) months, also without benefit of any power. Plugged it in, pushed the power button and it TURNED ON! There is also no hard drive in the system so the "operating system not found" message finally appeared. I've tried CTRL-ALT-DEL several times, but I've not been able to access the BIOS. No "Press F1" message is appearing and holding down the F1 key for the minute or so it takes for the system to figure out no operating system is available doesn't work either. More puzzles....)

(edit2: I took a chance and turned off the T22 and then back on. It powered up and I pressed the F1 key. It entered BIOS fine. Now the question is: Do I ever turn it off? )

[Rex]

Ray,

I know you have made many posts regarding dead screens; I have a couple.

Inter-changing screens with different bodies, and they all work, so I guess the problem is somewhere on the motherboard. Is there an easy/simple (?!) method of finding whatever the problem may be? I am no electronics expert.

All my mb's power and external monitor, all the screen cables work as do the inverters.

Rex

[RealBlackStuff]

You find THAT answer and you'll be rich!
I had a T30 with a similar problem, everything works, except no signal to the LCD, but on an external monitor it is perfect.
So I swapped the mobo, and everything is fine now.
Now looking for someone's brainwave to see if I could repair this myself.

[carbon_unit]

Ray, Earlier T series will not let you enter the BIOS with F1 on a reboot. You must power down, power up and catch F1. Not sure if it is still that way on newer models.

[tfflivemb2]

Ray, Earlier T series will not let you enter the BIOS with F1 on a reboot. You must power down, power up and catch F1. Not sure if it is still that way on newer models.

carbon_unit is exactly right. it must be a hard start and not a soft (ctrl-alt-del) start to acccess the BIOS.

[Rex]

Well I'll be a ........?

Followed Ray's advice regarding removing both batteries. After about four hours, replaced them and hey presto, she booted.

Have now removed the batteries to give her a longer 'holiday.'

Many thanks for the advice; it's much appreciated.

Rex

[rkawakami]

I didn't notice something last night during the excitement I had when both the T21 and T22 powered up...

The CMOS backup battery in the T22 WAS installed for the last couple of months the system has been idle. Only the main battery was pulled. It has maintained the correct time. The laptop has been stored "standing straight up"; the front edge of the system on the floor and sandwiched between several 600X machines. It's been like that ever since I got it last September but it has only turned on twice, maybe three times before.

I have been able to turn the system on for about 6 times in a row and I am running PC Doctor on it right now. One strange thing I did notice is that even if I set the CDROM drive to boot before the hard drive in the BIOS, the system still gives me an error message (in reverse red video) that says it could not find an OS on the hard drive (none is installed). Pressing the "any" key will then cause the laptop to boot from the CD. As this is the only T22 I've ever had, this may be normal behavior but it is different than the T23s I'm more familiar with.

So far no errors in PC Doctor. Not that I'm expecting any... Wonder when the "blink" is going to return... <sigh>... If I'd known that I'd be so lucky in getting these two dead machines to power up, I would have gone out and bought some lottery tickets for last night's drawing!

edit: It's now the next afternoon and the T22 continues to turn on properly; at least 12 times with no "blink of death". 10 complete passes of PC Doctor and 3 hours of memtest86+ without any errors. I've located the Hitachi 60GB drive that I was attempting to install an OS on, plugged it in and booted into WinXP. It appears that I was finishing a fresh install from a retail copy of Windows (WGA is present in my download directory ) since I see about 10 IBM install routines (battery MaxiMiser, hotkey, configuration utility, etc.). They are all dated four months ago (10/21/06 11PM). Details are coming back to me now... I think I was at a point where it was going to take some time to install all of the IBM utilities, it was late and I decided to stop and turn off power. It never came back on . So I pulled the drive, labelled it "T22 partial install", stuck it on a pile of disk drives, pulled the battery and let it "hibernate". In the last four months I think I've tried powering it up twice before last night. So it's possible that you don't have to pull the backup battery. Or maybe it doesn't even matter; that something else is causing the laptop to work/not work. At this point I'm just happy to figure out what's on the mystery T22 hard drive (it can be recycled; nothing important on it), that a note I made about the LCD is correct (one stuck green pixel and a couple of pressure spots), and that everything else seems to be working fine, whenever it finally does decide to power up.

[rkawakami]

Bumping an old thread for some latest news...

A couple of days after my last post (see above) the T22 decided not to turn on again; Death had come knocking at the door once more. Back it went under the desk to contemplate its future place in my Thinkpad society. I left it alone to count the seconds, minutes, hours, days and months (almost two) - a fancy way of saying that I left the CMOS battery installed but pulled the main battery. Tonight while looking for a T23 that is going to volunteer as an LCD panel checkout platform, I saw the forlorn T22 sitting before me. I took pity on its emaciated condition and decided to pour some juice into it (I plugged in an AC adapter).

It fired right up.

It's been power cycled 4 times tonight and it's working perfectly again. I really need to tear this system down and start poking around....

[schen]

I'll get to join you guys soon. I just picked up a T20 with a dead MB on ebay, so I'll get a chance to play with all the machinations you guys have been through!