Docked A31p, standby & booting problems

[matermark]

I have been using my A31p in a dock for the last couple months w/o any problems. I bought the dock new. I usually shut it down to standby mode using Fn+F4 every night. It's attached to an external 19" LCD. This setup has been working flawlessly for me.

This morning I pressed the Fn key to resume and the external monitor never got a signal, though it sounded like the laptop started up. I tried the Fn F7 but nothing happened. So I tried to power off w/the power button. Never seemed to shut down so had to hold the button down to shut off.

When I tried powering on again, the external monitor was again receiving a signal but went as far as the Windows xp logo screen, with the blue status bar moving, the led lights on the case blinking as normal, then no more blinking but the blue status bar still moving. I couldn't boot.

So I restarted and tried last known good, that didn't work. I went into safe mode and shut down & tried again & the same. I again wentr into safe mode & scheduled a chkdsk with both repair & free space checked. Rebooted and same logo screen w/status bar moving.

Tried again w/command prompt only and got the page of sys drivers loaded and stayed at that screen with the HDD light flashing for a really long time (hours.) So tried to hot reboot and do anytrhing to get the chkdsk to run, no luck.

I finally took the hard drive out and put it in another A31p. It booted to the blue chkdsk and ran all the steps and went into xp! So I rebooted to see if it worked and it did, in the 2nd A31p without a dock. So I swapped the drive back into the original A31p and it booted as well. I figured maybe the HDD was on its way out, so took a spare 60GB and replaced a 20GB in an ultrabay adapter; I Fn+F4 to standby to add the 2nd HDD and the machine started to beep. So I shut it down and rebooted. I then had the same rebooting problem again!

So I took the ultrabay HDD & put it into machine #2. I know this adapter used to work a few months ago but in My Computer, I got no 2nd HDD letter. In the meantime I downloaded some software to clone the drives on #2. I decided to try the software on #2 first, to see how it works, by cloning that drive to the spare 60GB... instead of using the ultrabay adapter, I put the drive in a pcmcia adapted external case, and am clonung the 2nd A31p drive to the spare HDD but it's taking hours (3-4) and only 62% so far.

So I'm now running the #1 machine in the dock with safe mode until I figure out the boot problem or until the #2 machine is freed up from cloning. When I had the machine in the dock the last couple months, the only problem I had was originally getting the resolution set the way I wanted. Somehow, it runs in 1280 res on the external monitor (that is the max on the 4:3 19" LCD) but when docked it looks like 1600 res. When I undocked it it went back to big fonts and 1280.

Does anybody remember where you set the profile for using the dock? I forgot how I got these fonts to change with the dock.

Why isn't the ultrabay adapter HDD showing up?

More important, why didn't the laptop come out of standby like it has been doing w/o any problems for months?

And MOST IMPORTANT, why is the boot hanging at the XP logo screen, and any suggestions to fix this? I cannot boot into regular mode.

Thanks very much.

[sjthinkpader]

There maybe a hardware failure in the system and Windows hung at boot. Try the barebones test by removing all that can be removed and test with one SODIMM.

[matermark]

Well, it took me all yesterday to get back on.... I rebooted thru just about every possible choice under F8. The same results. Then install the drive in machine #2 and it worked and then put it back into #1 & it worked. Fearing the drive may be going, I installed cloning software in #1... what does it say to do? I need to reboot! It rebooted and it didn't work again! Then swapped it to #2, got it working, and put it back in #1. It worked! But then when I tried starting the clone SW, there was a fatal error and couldn't run it.

I really don't remember everything I did to get it to boot, I did sooooo many things. I think somewhere in there I undocked and redocked too. I went into standby with no problems last night and will try again tonite. Right now it's working and unless others here do a better diagnosis, I really don't know what to try, or if I should try ANYTHING!

[sjthinkpader]

Download PC Doctor diagnostic program and run it.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-56222