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    W510 - what just happened? It now boots.

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by krauster, Jul 13, 2012.

  1. krauster

    krauster Notebook Enthusiast

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    I have a w510. This morning it wasn't booting. It would get to the ThinkPad screening and stop and not respond to pushing the blue button. I tried booting with the recovery disk that I had made a few years ago. No boot, same thing.

    I called Lenovo and they could only say it's out of warranty and will cost up to $550 for a new motherboard because the BIOS must be corrupted.

    I then came to this site, read the current T400 won't boot thread where it suggest to play around with taking out the battery and trying to boot without it. Didn't help. I noticed that it was quite hot, and noticed the AC adapter was pretty hot too.

    Read something about removing the CMOS battery. So I unscrewed a few panels on the bottom and found what they were- hard drive and I think RAM slots. No cmos battery. Then I thought about opening the whole bottom part with the dozen screws and unscrewed them but I couldn't figure out how to pop the panel off so I gave up. Tightened the dozen screws.

    Plugged the battery back in and this time it booted. I noticed that it wanted to do some windows updates and I let it do that. Now it's fine.

    What happened?
     
    krauster, Jul 13, 2012
    #1
  2. ZaZ

    ZaZ Super Model Super Moderator

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    Try a Linux disc to see if it'll boot. That should tell you if it's a hardware or software issue.
     
    ZaZ, Jul 13, 2012
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  3. Ryan

    Ryan NBR Moderator

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    Discharging the computer for a while without the AC or the Battery connected -

    acts like discharging the CMOS battery.. ;)

    So you did the alternative of taking out the CMOS battery.
     
    Ryan, Jul 13, 2012
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  4. krauster

    krauster Notebook Enthusiast

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    I only had the battery out for 10 minutes. Depending on the load it sees I guess that could be enough time to discharge a little battery.

    But what does discharging the CMOS battery do?

    But now it's consistently booting to windows, and waking from sleep in windows, this evening.
     
    krauster, Jul 13, 2012
    #4