T41 won't boot. No display, no POST, no Anything

Friends
just today I was trying to debug a network problem on a friend's IBM T41 Thinkpad... it was working fine other than an intermittent blocking of the network. Went to do the third or fourth reboot/restart and that time it would not boot at all.

Removed battery, plugged in to AC, tried again a couple of times and get nothing. not even a flicker on the screen. The power comes on, the disk is turning [i can hear it] but that's the end.

Anyone seen this before? I'm suspicious that the custom drivers every good laptop has for hibernation etc have gotten corrupted. If I can't get to the point in POST where it lights the DVD drive, how can I get some sort of reprogramming going?

Anyone know if there is an accessible CMOS battery? Where to find?

thx ... Happy Independence Day -

 

Try plugging in a regular monitor to it and see if you get anything on that screen.

E

 

OK did that but its not getting to that point in the boot routine.
I did get it to boot twice since posting this but its extremely unstable. once was with a low level burnin bootable cd it came up but halted before loading the app.
after a dozen more startup tries, it came up, loaded windows very sluggishly [the system came with XP Pro], so I tried to establish a new account, still wondering if the main user account was corrupted but I could get around it.
got it to function long enough to set one up but the system is halting every few seconds.
for instance, the routine XP goes through when you login for the first time to a new account - that is a really disk-intensive operation. the disk light would go off and the network light would come on. it SEEMS that if I move the system the hard drive wakes up again for a second, then off. so the whole routine of attempting initialization for that new account took like 45 minutes of halt/start/halt/start and never really got done. I tried a RESTART but it failed so I'm back to square zero again. Blank unlit screen. fan comes on, DVD does get tested and will spin up if anything is there, but nothing makes it to the screen.

hardware?
CMOS?
bad motherboard?

crazy thing is, under the Guest account early this morning I had it looking 'normal' for awhile - updating windows XP with SP3. but after the final restart in that string, it would not boot again. However, I did notice the main user's account was very shaky even while I had the Guest account working smoothly. I was suspicious of a gremlin when looking at the main account - it would knock itself off the network every few seconds. no popups or other typical signs of virus or trojan.

anyway, if I can't get a reliable boot I'm toast.

anyone know where the CMOS battery is?

 

Clue!!
it finally occurred to me that heat might be a factor. I put the laptop in the refrigerator for awhile and it booted on the first try.
I managed to get an updated bios done successfully, but I'm wondering about the fan/control for the thing: I note that if I boot DOS or some other low level thing, not windows, the fan defaults to "on all the time", which is good. but when windows XP Pro is up and things going on, I"ve yet to hear the fan run. its loud, so quite noticable.

if anyone has a clue, pls let me know.

the network function is very flaky, but I think that's solvable... it doesn't like big downloads like virus updates etc. ordinary web stuff is ok.
two of the three user accounts are corrupted by something... i know not what. one works ok.

 

Get a can of air and clean out all the vents/heatsinks and fans. You might want to take it partially apart to get to all the dirt out. Also make sure all the fan(s) are working.

E

 

yer on the right track, fred.
by understanding this was a heat problem, I was able to find some great help
For anyone that finds this thread and has issues, great link here http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?p=431586&sid=476b18e06dac2d776310b47b9becb741
and the freeware app they are talking about, to control fans, hardware:
http://www.pbus-167.com/nhc/nhc.htm#anchor_download

Looks like I have some maintenance work to do and then we should be swell.
I had no idea I could step back the processor speed and save some heat & stress, for one thing...

 

Hi!
I've got T41 with the very simular problem. It worked just fine until I put in a flash drive into USB port. Immediately it went down and now doesn't start. When I push the start button (Z) indicator and battery condition indicator are the only things that on, I can also hear a sound of fan working, but nothing else happens. I add an external monitor, but no luck, monitor says "no signal". Removed everything: hard disk, cd drive, changed battery, but nothing worked out.
Hope I can resurect my old T41 laptop with the help of this forum. Any suggestion would be very much appreciated.
Thank you!

 

I have installed SpeedFan (I think, may be it was another temperature monitoring progtam, I'm not on that machine at present) on the T41 I use in order to monitor the CPU temperature. As the T41 is old design, it doesn't come with many monitoring features.

As to using a can of compressed air, one site warned that rotating the fan in the reverse irection can permantly damage it, so use short bursts only "you can ruin the fan it you let the air blow it full speed reverse, so use short bursts of air on the fan" - http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-laptop-and-netbook-25/how-to-open-ibm-lenovo-t41-to-clean-the-heat-sink-747832/)

As the T41 comes with a Pentium processor, it will shut down automatically before damage the to the CPU occurs (I believe I remember reading somewhere)

Some links on disassembly, reassembly, and cleaning of T41 (this can be quite an involved process. Access to the fan and its removal involves the removal of the keypad - I would read about how do this carefully if you intend to do this). Most recommend the replacement of the fan ssembly (Fan Error on attempting to boot).

http://www.ehow.com/how_6920529_disassemble-thinkpad-t41.html
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/guides-and-manuals/default.page?selector=expand (Lenovo Hardware Maintenance manual)
http://www.insidemylaptop.com/replace-cooling-fan-ibm-thinkpad-t43-laptop/

Searching on the internet will reveal more posts on how to clean your IBM T41

Please note: I am not recommendinging anything here, I haven't actually been brave enough to dissemble a T41 !! This is for your information only.

Dumb_Question
3.June.2013
Compaq Presario S5160UK DT261A under XP/SP3
Processor - Celeron 2.7 GHz
Motherboard - MSI MS-6577 v2.1
RAM - 1GB + 512MB (1GB +1GB max) DDR PC2700
PSU - Octigen 300W model 10270PSOTG ('upgraded' from original Bestec 250W PSU [in 2011?])
Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics card in AGP slot.