29 not POSTing

Very strange.

The 29 in my signature has been running great since I got it a few months ago.

Today it's acting up, and it's either not POSTing and the MP light stays on, or when it boots into XP, I get a blue screen with an ialmrnt5.dll infinate loop error. That DLL is a graphics dll. I took one from my work issued 29 and copied it over with BartPE. No help.

Booting into Vista just hangs when it's booted.

Sometimes it won't POST. When I hit F2 to get in there, it hangs on a dark screen.

How can that .dll be an issue when it won't POST? The .dll is a windows issue, and if it's not getting in windows, whats the issue?


Here's what I've done to try to remedy it.

1: Searched the forums
2: Removed RAM
3: Removed WiFi
4: Removed Keyboard
5: Removed factory GPS
6: Looked for BIOS battery, can't find it

Sometimes it will boot to CD, and I've run BartPE to get some of my files off the HDD. Sometimes it won't get to the CD, and not even POSTing that far.

So it seems we have two issues:

1: POST- it isn't going there with the MP light staying on
2: When it does POST, not getting into Windows with a BSOD

Any ideas??

TIA

 

Are you able to boot into VGA mode? You may have a hardware problem with the graphics card.
I'd try VGA mode and safe mode, as well as running a video memory stress test.

 

I can't get it into safe mode, but I'll boot up with BartPE (if I can- most of the time I can't even get into any boot sequence) and run it.

I ran the memtest with Vista, but it hung.

Also, I haven't banged or mistreated it. It sat in the back seat of my patrol car all day yesterday and all I did was run from accident to accident from the snow we had. I haven't done anything out of the ordinary with it at all. I'm pretty sure the HDD is fine. I put it in my MK5 29 and am on it now under Vista (XP won't boot- most likely a laptop generation thing from MK1 to MK5 but Vista is working fine and quick)

Also, no POST error codes, no beeps given.

 

The video memory stress test is a bootable iso, it runs a memtest on the video memory much like those run on the system memory by tests like memtest86+. Download the archive and extract the VMTCE.iso from the VMTCE directory. Burn that to a CD with a program like IMGBurn or whatever you prefer, and boot from it.
If this passes I would run other hardware tests, specifically a memtest and a hard drive test.
Sometimes things just go bad, it has nothing to do with mistreatment - just bad luck.

PS- Wanna send me a PBA card?

 

Have you tried removing the CD-ROM drive? Perhaps it has gone sideways. I have seen dead CD and hard drives cause weird issues during boot up. It might also explain the intermitant ability to boot from CD.

 

I've tried a different HDD and caddy from my other 29 and removed the CD drive- also my Sprint aircard and bluetooth/USB PCMCIA card. I've removed as much as I can to make it barebones.

I can't find it- what is the MP light next to my touchpad? It won't shut off.

I'm so hoping I don't need a new motherboard. I just sold my spare 29.

 

This may sound stupid.... But you may want to open all the port doors, pull out everything you can (battery, hard drive, DVD) and then shake it back and forth to see if anything falls out.

Every now and then stuff can get mysteriously sucked into the innards and land on contacts where they shouldn't... Just a thought... Maybe even lightly blow some compressed air where you can... Remove the keyboard and gain better access if you need to.

Just a thought..

 

Try replacing the CMOS battery. If it is going out, you will get post errors and windows conflicts as well. If you remove the bottom cover completely, after removing the ram first and unplugging the speaker of course, you will find a 40c ribbon cable on the front left side that runs UNDER the hard drive caddy, then up to the motherboard. There is also a smaller, 12c I believe, next to that. Carefully remove those two and you should be able to see the CMOS battery tucked under the motherboard at that spot. ~Someone chime in if I remember that wrong~

I think this is your best bet at this point. Let us know what you find.

 

Another good idea... Also... Have you tried swapping hard drives to test?

 

I have swapped hard drives and it's the same problem.

I just changed my CMOS battery and still nothing. I still have the MP light in the box my the touchpad stuck on when I try to boot it.

 

More results. Now that I changed CMOS, I removed my RAM this time (although I did it before and it didn't help) and it's booted into XP. However it's still locking up on the Welcome screen, the mouse won't move.

I shut it down and now that MP box light is back on. It won't boot back up.

Grrrrrr

 

Sounds like bad Onboard RAM then. Sorry, that means replacing the MB.

 

So not cool. I just sold a 29 a couple of months ago.

I put up a want ad in the buy and sell area. 29 motherboard need for a 29C.

*sigh*

 

If you want to be sure.... run a Memtest as I suggested in my earlier posts.
Why invest in a new board without even being sure what the problem is?

 

Also you have no reason not to take it apart now... Check for stuff on the motherboard. Bad RAM on the motherboard is fairly rare I think. Also... Try removing the battery and booting with just the A/C adapter. You can also try to get into the BIOS and turn everything off and then see if it will boot.

Just some other ideas....

 

May I know how open you swapped both harddrive with caddy and media bay? I think you will get it what I mean to say.



ohlip

 

When I swapped the caddy, I did it with the caddy and HDD from my work 29, so at least I have something to test against.

Toughbook, I've done what you instructed- nothing inside. I blew it out with compressed air. I've removed the battery and just used AC.

It looks like I have a brand new parts machine. I've done almost everything I can. Even an external CRT monitor doesn't work.

Thanks for everyone's help and suggestions.

 

I guess it's safe to assume at this point that your memory test passed?

 

I can't get it to run a mem test. it just won't get that far.

 

mrbungle... I have two CF-29s that won't pass post. I bought them as parts machines anyway but it was back in the day when parts machine was as much as a good one is worth these days. (Figure THAT out!)

I had heard from the TB techs that this is not uncommon. They fail for various reasons I was told and that you really need the test equipment at Heartland to figure out the cause. And their fix is a new motherboard as I don't think they get into microsoldering to fix issues. It would be cheaper for you to buy a parts laptop on ebay and maybe continue to play around with this one just to see if you can fix it later.

Just a thought.

 

MrB-

The MB light is of course a warning/usage light for the MediaBay slot (I'm sure you knew that). It includes connections to both the floppy-drive controller and the IDE controller in your laptop; it is no surprise that a failure there can bring down your whole laptop. A couple things to try:

First - a REALLY REALLY careful visual inspection. Remove whatever you've got in the media bay, get a small flashlight & maybe a magnifying glass, then inspect the port connectors inside the MediaBay. My CF-28 Mk1 had a little bit of copper wire stuck in the floppy drive connector socket; this was the "failure" that caused it to be sold on FleaBay "AS-IS".

Second: Try disabling the Floppy Drive controller in BIOS; I was able to get another couple years out of a NICE ASUS DUAL-XEON server that had a failed Floppy controller on the MB by doing this; the couple times I ever needed to boot it from floppy, I just used a USB floppy.

mnem <~~~When all else fails-ily~*

 

Wow, awesome- I'll take a look and report the results.

 

Thats is why I ask him how open he swap the media bay and harddrive at the beginning of this thread, maybe there is a pin bent or damaged that has contact to other pin. Just check the pin maybe dirt or corrosion.

Ok! I gonna go. Its party time....



ohlip

 

Ok- a preliminary investigation shows this-

No hard drive, no RAM, no battery, no CD drive installed- the bottom of the notebook is off and the internals exposed.

Plugging it in and trying to turn it on yeilds nothing. No lights come on anywhere, and it won't do anything- totally dead. When I shove the battery inside, then it's able to light up, but no POST.

A visual inspection of the media bay area shows nothing out of the ordinary that I can see. No bent pins, nothing lodged inside, etc.

I figure even with the battery out, the orange power light *should* be on.

 

MrB -

At least on my CF-28s, that battery light ONLY lights up when a battery is installed AND AC power is applied; it is a battery charging indicator, so if either aren't present... well, you get the idea.

Red means discharged but charging, flashing red means defective battery or charge circuit, orange means partially charged & charging, and green means connected to AC but fully charged. Next to the charge indicator is the power on indicator - it's green... like Saurian Brandy.

As for the results of your inspection... I would have someone else look at those connectors too, just to be on the safe side. Sometimes a second set of eyeballs is all it takes to pick up something one overlooks - better to feel silly & find the problem than be proud & miss it.

mnem
MOOP!

 

I tested this out on my other 29. With the battery out and plugged in, it can boot up and with no HDD it gets into BIOS. This one does sometimes, but no BIOS.

 

Sounds like to have an intermittent short... Or ground... You may try inspecting for cold solder joints or loose screws. Or loose ribbon cables. These things are built to take jolts...

For example... Sometimes I'll have a DVD Rom that won't work... Or it will play a movie but not music. After taking it all apart and reassembling the way I KNOW it has to go... It will work. Sometimes I don't see anything wrong... But putting it back together seems to do it. Just a thought...

 

Yep, the 'take it apart and put it back together' fix is a very common scenario.

The root cause of this is that the connector surfaces tarnish everywhere they are not in metal-to-metal contact, then at some point due to vibration or thermal expansion something moves a fraction and the connection becomes metal-to-tarnish...

When you dismantle whatever it is and re-assemble it, all the connector surfaces get a scrape and the connections are re-made.

Oddly, gold connectors are one of the worst culprits, if you give any old PCI card connector a rub with a bit of folded copier paper you will be amazed at the crud that you take off it. Tin or solder surfaces are more reliable because the contacts sink into the soft metal and form a much larger gas-tight area.

The only cure for this I have found so far is using something to seal the connector surface. A trace of an oily contact cleaner (or WD-40) applied with a cotton bud works, but you must be carefull it does not damage the material (I'd not use it on flexible circuits) and it attracts dust.

The best stuff I've found is sold by Electrolube in the UK, it's just called 'High Performance Dry Lubricant'. It's sold for printer and copier mechanisms & it dries like alcohol - no sign of anything left and no trace of oil - but it does leave a dry film that stops tarnish without affecting the connector in any way.

Bit of a long post, hope it is of use.
Robert.

 

Thanks for the post Robert- it wasn't long and it jogged my mind a bit.

Ok, here's whats up. I took the entire motherboard totally out, inspected it, and put it all back together. It *looked* fine.

I can get it to boot into XP and Vista, but it locks up shortly after it finishes loading everything up. Then it shuts itself down.

I got one ialmrnt5.dll blue screen.

I ran the Windows Memory Test, but it shut down mid way through it.

I shut down the floppy controller in BIOS like was mentioned earlier in the thread.

I'm starting to wonder if there's a heat issue going on, where it's shutting down to prevent damage.

I'm running BartPE on it right now to see how long it stays on. It's been running fine in memory for a bit now. I'm doing a checkdisk on the hard drive now.

 

MrB -


This would be a good timer to try the MEMTEST86+ Bootable I suggested earlier in the thread...

mnem
Ooooh... checkerboard memory test with striding zeros....

 

I downloaded it put it on a disk- it didn't boot to it. I'll look at it again.

*CORRECTION*

D-uh- imgburn... I'm on it now.. Results coming soon

 

I suggested a Memtest and video memory test in post 2 and 4 in this thread and they seemed to have gone ignored. Even though I troubleshoot laptops professionally and for a problem like this that's undoubtedly the first thing I would have done.

It's cause I don't have a toughbook

 

It's not been ignored, it's in the works. I don't work on computers professionally, I'm a cop. I'm trying to fix this and do a ton of other things at once. I get to work on it for maybe 30 minutes a day.

I'm trying to run the memtest but now it won't get to POST and boot of the CD.

Bag it, time to get another one. I've wasted enough time on this.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions. They are appreciated.

 

Still no Toughbook? For my money you are one of the few "outsiders" who are welcome here any time.
CAP

 

MRB, I did a google on your blue screen and found this, granted, in my experience, looking those up rarely helps but who knows. It just might work this time. What MK is your laptop?

 

MrB... I agree... Sounds almost like a heat related issue. What popped into my head was that it may have been overheated at one point or something is shorting out. A flaky resistor? When you said you looked at this did you go over it with a magnifier? I'll tel you now that you will find it almost impossible to fix this only going at it for 30 minutes per day.

My advice? Throw this one on the "To Do" list and buy another. One day when you have the time... Get to it and figure it out.

Just a thought...

 

I'm running the video memory stress test right now. It's been doing it for 68 minutes now on the 18th pass, and it's running strong. I think if there was gonna be an issue it would have happened by now.

I had to take the bottom of the unit off to get it to boot up this time. There's nothing on the bottom right now.

My 1GB stick of RAM is removed.

I'm downloading memtest86 now to try that.

 

Usually once you hit 5 passes you're safe. One pass is sometimes not enough, sometimes memory only starts giving errors once it has heated up a bit.

I've seen memory that passes the first three times, then every byte has at least one faulted bit on every pass after that

 

Alright- pass 22 gave me 35K errors and counting, 1 hour 40 minutes into it.

It locked up. Then I discovered something. On the bottom of the 29, I pushed down near the *general area* of the corner of the wifi card where it plugs in at the center of the board. It restarted the test. i let go and it stopped the test and locked, then I pushed down hard and ti restarted and kept going.

Error at [10XXXXX] must be 10, but found FF (bits: 11101111)

 

You've got a cold solder joint or a bad connection somewhere... I'd remove everything you can and blast into all connectors/connections with high pressure air then go over everything again. If you can push down and have the test restart, let go - have it freeze, then push it down and have it start.. There is SOMETHING you are doing when you press down that completes the correct circuit.

Am I understanding what you did correctly?

 

Yeah, you're understanding it correctly. It is looking more mechanical than electronic and quite possibly a solder issue. Hopefully this problem is getting narrowed down.

 

Here again... I would take a minimum of a 10X magnifier lens and go over everything. It may have been dropped in a former life and hit that 1 in a bazillion "sweet spot" for that to happen. Or maybe it was from the factory... You may not know until you find it.

 

Hooo doggie... this is what I feared you might have run into.

Troubleshooting at the component level (which is what you are trying to do) is generally pretty confusing for the uninitiated. A good magnifying glass is a MUST; as is very good lighting. I have one of those medical exam lamps with the magnifying glass inside a circular bulb; but I still often use a good flashlight to make sure I'm seeing what I think I am. Be VERY patient, and don't remove ANYTHING, even if it seems it must be wrong, until you can post close-up pix of what you think is wrong for us to look at. We'll try and talk you through this; but these units are so tightly-packed with components, it's easy even for experienced techs to do damage if they slip up.

mnem<~~~ ParrotHead Dwagon~*

 

I went and bought a 10 and 15X magnifying glass thing at Radio Shack today, and a new tip for my solidering iron. I was looking around with a good LED light and man- I have no idea what I'm looking for. It all:

a: looks the same
b: looks *normal*

And to top it off, the dang thing is so intermittant in how it sometimes loggs on, then not, then when it does it sometimes blue screens with ialmrnt5.dll error.

It worked fine, then I had it in the back of my patrol car. All I did was go from accident to accident on a bad snow day here in Utah, and it wasn't subjected to anything it shouldn't/can't.

I'm going to take a good couple of hours, and really go over this motherboard and see if I can salvage it. It's 29C/MK1 so while it isn't the latest and greatest, it's one of the best notebooks I've ever used and I really like it. The touchscreen is perfect, it has factory GPS and it's ultra clean because thats how I roll.

 

MNEMENTH, OBGYN*
San Antonio, TX.​

​

All kidding aside... After doing a little thinkin' and drinkin'... Jack tells me that this is a DLL error.... This is NOT usually something you get with a hardware issue is it? Anyone? Anyone?

Bueller? Bueller?

Try to reload the OS. See if you can even do that. Heck... Swap in a drive out of an old Dull Inspiron or something if you can... Just to test if you CAN load a new OS.

And for Dog's sake... If Mnementh asks you to put your legs in the stirrups....

- - RUN! - - ​

* The World's FIRST Dwagon OBGYN! (Screw the whiskers... Beware the firebreath!)

 

Software errors can be caused by hardware errors. Since he has trouble posting and he has problems in stand-alone, bootable tools, like memtest, we can say for certain that [the primary issue] is not software, though he may have some software error in addition to hardware. At the very least, we know some hardware issue exists.

A dll error like the one he described is consistent with a failing hard drive, memory, or video memory, hence my suggestion to run the memtests.

Since we've seen a failure there and the inability to boot memtest+, and the GPU in this laptop is an Intel GMA which will use system memory and has no dedicated of its own, I think it's a system memory issue.

If this laptop does in fact have integrated memory (I do not know if it does, but I am pretty sure it has 256MB onboard, right?)
Put your memory stick back in and try booting memtest again. Also try an older version of memtest, I have found some will boot when others won't.

 

Mmmmhmmm... you know, dwagons have lots of "special skills" that could be beneficial in such an application...

*Tries to think how wings, claws & scales could be useful*

Mhmmmmm... Nope. I don't think I could do it. I just love the female body... every bit of it, every way they come be it big, little, short or tall. There's just NO WAY I could ever look at that stuff in a clinical sense...

mnem
Dammit Jim! I'm a lover, not a doctor...