Somebody with T500 Please help. Need to blindly disable ATI card

I bought an out of warranty Lenovo T500 with a faulty ATI card which worked perfectly well with switchable graphics disabled. Unfortunately for some stupid reason I decided to test the ATI card and turned switchable graphics feature on in BIOS. Now the laptop boots to a black screen (internal / external) and I cannot get to the option to disable hybrid feature. Is there some way to re-set the BiOS settings so that I can use the intel graphics?
I tried to remove the bios battery, hoping it would reset CMOS but this resulted in a few extra beeps and not much else.
Now I think my only hope is to blindly navigate the BIOS menu's to disable the switchable graphics. I know its a big favour to ask but could someone write down the keypress steps on how to do this?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

Have you tried to boot into Safe Mode and trying to disable it there?

 

Unfortunately it does not display anything on the screen at all, I cannot even get into bios

 

Tsunade,

He can't see his display. How does he boot into safe mode?

Renee

 

Someone with the T400 or T500 will need to give step by step instructions to navigate inside the bios for him
Or make a video that will help him
Maybe you can Master REST the laptop, I think defaults are integrated video? I forget since i sold our T400 a few months back
Pull battery and cmos battery?

 

I tried pulling the cmos battery to no avail.. I was thinking that maybe I could find an autoexecuting CD to flash new bios, as it seems to seek disk upon boot. Not sure where to look for one though.

 

If someone can verify that the T400 BIOS is ordered the same as the T500, I'd be more than happy to help. Also send a message to user MidnightSun with a link to this thread; his sig says he's got a T500 with switchable graphics.

 

The bios flash will likely incorporate your current settings

 

what about the lenovo test partition.
Have you tried to boot onto that?

Tsunade idea would work if you forced a shut down on the windows OS, the next boot would provide the safe boot options menu
only a few blind keystokes there to get it to boot safe mode

 

Way ahead of you

Here are the directions to switch from Switchable Graphics to Integrated Graphics, as of BIOS revision 3.11. If you're on Discrete Graphics, you will need to press Down Arrow twice where noted.

Good luck, hopefully that fixes your issues.

 

Laptop came without lenovo partition, though I'm not sure if that matters as it does not seem to be booting windows anyway (judging by the HDD activity led).
@vinuneuro - I believe t400 have the same bios, so a keystroke log would be immensely appreciated.

 

Nvm, you're set.

 

That should help

 

Thanks MidnightSun, - unfortunately it does not seem to be restarting when F10 is pressed, so I have a strong suspicion I am not actually getting to the BIOS screen at all .
could you confirm for me if your caps lock light toggles whilst in BIOS, as mine does not, which I suspect would indicate that the system has hung on some error somewhere.

 

The first step can be skipped.

Once you push the power button, wait 2-3sec to for it to post. Then push F1 once or twice to get into the bios.

 

many thanks for everyones help, it looks like i might need to buy a new motherboard as I cannot see a way to recover it here. Will get it priced with lenovo tomorrow, if its more than £150 I will probably just sell the whole thing for parts.

 

You're probably better off hitting eBay. Lenovo's going to be quite expensive.

 

T500 with ATI switchable graphics card have a higher failure rate than the integrated only version. I have seen quite a few of these problems crawling up like this, where the ATI discrete graphics card stopped working, while the intel remained working.

However, your problem seemed to be more like something caused by a severe drop or liquid spill. Did the person whom sold you the machine mentioned why the machine stopped working? A working motherboard of the same class, would probably cost you around 200 to 300 quid.

 

I doubt it was liquid damaged as it worked well for me for over 2 months. It only stopped working when I decided to try enabling the switchable graphics in bios.

 

Liquid damage does not mean that your laptop will fail instantaneously. It really depends on where the short circuit and corrosion occurs, and how much current is run through that particular part of the motherboard and sort of electronics are involved (obviously how much and what kind of liquid you spilled would also affect the time to failure).

 

FIXED IT YAY!!1 To those unlucky enough to get into the same situation this is how you resolve it:
Take out the keyboard and apply some pressure with a blunt object (like backside of a screwdriver) onto the GPU. Now try to boot the laptop whilst keeping pressure on the GPU, if you are lucky enough it will boot so you can get into bios and disable switchable graphics.
Thanks for everyones input guys.

 

Hehe, glad to see you made it work
And the way it worked - old school soviet's style - if it doesnt work, give it a hammer treatment

 

Congrats! Sounds like the same kind of issue from T41-T43 and T61 days.

 

If what you did got it working, then you probably could get the motherboard fixed by reballing the ati gpu in the future.

 

A most thrilling and unexpected finale!