Screen is tiled, incl. BIOS display. R61

[RS14]

Machine is a Thinkpad R61 8918-CTO. Discrete video: NVidia 140M (?). It could be some other Nvidia card, but 140M is my recollection.

Fan/Heatsink assembly replaced three weeks prior to start of current issue. No problems observed prior to current display issue.

Various Operating Systems: Ubuntu 8.04 (Gnome), Win Server 2003. GRUB used as bootloader.

BIOS version 2.17 7KETB7WW
Embedded Controller Version 1.08

Friday, the screen went blank (while playing a DirectX based game that had previously caused no problems.), but the computer was otherwise running. I powered it down and rebooted into Windows, and the problem reoccurred within a few minutes. On the second reboot, it made it to the Ubuntu desktop. While loading a different program in WINE, it went blank in the same manner. The third reboot resulted in garbled output.

Load prior to the blank screen was not exceptional. The machine had been used to play about 3 hours of flash video earlier in the day, but had subsequently booted without trouble.

Now it first displays basic information about e.g. processor, RAM, etc. Then it displays a sequence of vertical red lines. Then it proceeds to GRUB. The appearance is as if all output is undersized, and is then tiled across the screen. Thus I have eight subscreens, on which all output is duplicated, although five of them are cropped by the screen boundaries. This occurs even when displaying the BIOS and similar. Additionally, some other graphical issues occur. For example, there are faint vertical gray lines on the BIOS configuration screens. The Ubuntu splash screens appear with a green tint.

Attempting to boot into Windows fails. Attempting to boot into Ubuntu fails. Attempting to boot D**n Small Linux succeeds, and reaches the desktop. Of course, it is still tiled, but it is usable.

lspci -v -s 01:00.0 gives output as follows:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0429 (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Lenovo Unknown device 20d8
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 10
Memory at d6000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable)
Memory at d4000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable)
I/O ports at 2000
Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
Capabilities: <access denied>

I can reach the BIOS. Setting 'Config > Display > Default Primary Video Device' to 'Internal' from the old value of 'PCI Express' temporarily resolved the problem. The system booted without issues twice. The system was then put into sleep mode. Attempting to resume returned it to the previous tiled output. Returning to the Primary Video Device 'PCI Express' setting produced no result. Returning to 'Internal' from the default setting produced no result.

All help is appreciated. In particular, if you are aware of Linux tools potentially useful in diagnosing this, I can probably figure out how to make my own live-CD to include anything necessary.

Thanks.

[ajkula66]

Welcome to the forum!

Posting a link to the pictures of your machine "misbehaving" would help, but I'm guessing a GPU failure here.

Any warranty left?

[SafeHarbor]

You could try plugging an external monitor into it to see what happens.

[RS14]

Welcome to the forum!

Posting a link to the pictures of your machine "misbehaving" would help, but I'm guessing a GPU failure here.

Any warranty left?

Thanks.

I actually took a couple of photos, but I seem to have misplaced the USB cord for the Camera. I'll see if I can borrow one tomorrow.

No warranty, unfortunately.

You could try plugging an external monitor into it to see what happens.

On an external monitor with a VGA connection, I see a single screen, but with lots of dots in a regular array all over it. Light gray for the BIOS screen, red dots briefly, green vertical lines briefly, and gray dots all over the D**n Small Linux splash screen.

[ajkula66]

I'm fairly certain that you're going to need a new motherboard...this sounds more and more like nVidia chip gone haywire...

Good luck.

[RS14]

Assuming it is damage to the motherboard or GPU, is it possible that I made some mistake when replacing the Fan and Heatsink? Would an imperfect fit cause inadequate cooling followed by a failure of this kind?

I'd prefer if that were not the case, but if so, I'd like to at least learn from an expensive mistake.

[RealBlackStuff]

poshgeordie is looking for a T61/R61 to find out if he can fix the nVidia problem.
See this thread: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=84975
He might be able to save your machine.
It doesn't hurt to contact him!

[poshgeordie]

poshgeordie is looking for a T61/R61 to find out if he can fix the nVidia problem.
See this thread: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=84975
He might be able to save your machine.
It doesn't hurt to contact him!

Hi RS14 and sorry to hear of the problems you're having with the R61. As RBS has mentioned I am looking for a T/R61-p series laptop with this issue so that I can work out exactly what the problem is.

Please have a look at the link above and see what you think.

Regarding my track record and overall reputation, Ajkula66 gave this unsolicited testimony (for which I'm very grateful!). Also have a look at my reflowing advert at the top of the page.

PM sent.