T400 Dock Problem

Received our company's first T400 today.

1) Put the machine into the advanced minidock. Power on computer, nothing on the monitor attached to the DVI port. Computer does boot up though (i can tell because you can hear it booting up and i opened up the laptop screen and it was booted. Vista startup sound came through laptop speakers, not speakers attached to dock. It's almost like it doesn't know it's in the dock.

2) With the machine OUT of the dock, put it to sleep, put it in the dock, then wake it up and then it does function properly in the dock.

Tried it in two different docks, same problem. A t61 in the dock will cold boot normally and function in the same dock.

Any ideas?

 

My T500 has a setting in the Bios to boot using an external monitor. Prior to changing this setting, the bios splash and first windows screen would display on the built in LCD, and then transition to the ext monitor.

I also changed the display settings under the advanced display property tabs to set it to run with a higher resolution on the external monitor with the built in LCD off.

 

Can someone else who has a T400 and an advanced mini dock with a DVI monitor please try this? Lenovo phone support was useless and had no idea. They said I could send it back for repair or maybe it was a bios issue I could wait on to be fixed.

I tried changing the bios setting per pastafarian's suggestion, the only options were internal lcd or external vga. A T61 in the same dock works perfectly.

 

Problem confirmed here. Changing the BIOS Display boot to Analog does not fix the problem. That is the setting on my T60p, which boots off DVI fine. Looks like a BIOS problem.

I just may send this back because of this. I live in my dock. I am already pissed off by the lack of QXVGA support.

 

I would like to confirm the same problem. I had a T61 and it would boot just fine from the dock with the external display. With the T400 it is almost acting like it does not know the dock is there. Sometimes I am able to have it work correctly if I leave the computer in sleep mode and the power it on. But not always.

I called Lenovo tech support and it was a complete waste of time as they guy on the phone was telling me it was not a hardware problem becuase the screen worked after it booted into Windows, and then I selected it. I was getting a little upset trying to tell him that nothing would show on the screen during the BIOS boot and he did not really understand that.

Along the same lines when it does boot, and after I open the lid and get it show up on the external display, I frequently have a to "mess" with the settings.

I would guess this is a BIOS issue as it does not work from the basic BIOS boot level.