Re: [Thinkpad] 600X CMOS Battery Issues

> [mailto:thinkpad-bounces@stderr.org] On Behalf Of Philip Kiff
> Sent: Saturday, November 4, 2006 11:47 PM

> Chris Schumann wrote on Sat 2006-11-04 22:31 EST:
> > My trusty (so far) 600X finally said buh-bye to its CMOS
> battery. 163
> > and 173 errors, and it made me set the clock, even though it was
> > correct over and over and over.
> >
> > I have a supervisor password on the machine, which I know, but it
> > still wouldn't boot.
> >
> > No big wup.
> >
> > I went to Batteries Plus and had them spot-weld a new cell on my
> > leads, popped it in, and got the 163 one more time.
> >
> > But now, it just reboots over and over. I wonder if it's
> confused by
> > the supervisor password, but I can't clear the password because I
> > can't get into EZSetup. The memory count appears, as does IBM and
> > ThinkPad, then the blinky cursor as if it's going to boot, but then
> > there's a beep, the screen goes off, and it reboots.
> >
> > Holding F1 has no effect.
> >
> > Any tips or pointers on how to get around this would be awesome.
> >
> > Should I try a BIOS upgrade? (And yes it's already at the latest.)
>
> I experienced this symptom with one of my 600X machines
> recently. My machine does not have a supervisor password,
> nor did I have a bad CMOS battery that needed replacement. I
> am still not quite sure what brought about my endless
> boot-post-blinky-blank-beep-reboot sequence.
>
> However, my current theories are that it was caused because I
> was switching around various hardware components on a
> multiple-hardware-profile, dual-boot
> (98SE/XPSP2) machine and the BIOS got confused about what the
> current hardware set was. Or that it was caused because I
> switched around my IDE "channel" configuration in Win 98SE by
> enabling the 3rd IDE channel in the ThinkPad config utility
> and that my BIOS got lost about where my actual boot drive
> date was supposed to be coming from.
>
> In my case, I was using a SelectaDock III with my 600X and
> the incessant reboot cycle only occurred when I tried to dock
> the system, not when I used the laptop standing alone. I was
> able to solve the problem by pulling all of the extra devices
> out of the SelectaDock III, deleting the docked hardware
> profile, and then booting up in the Dock.
>
> Now, everything is working fine with 3 hardware profiles and two OSes.
>
> It is hard for me to figure out whether there is any common
> element in my endless reboot sequence and yours, but maybe
> you can see something common there?? Do you have more than
> one hardware profile? More than one OS?
> Have you got any additional hardware devices that you can
> detach? Is you boot partition on C: with no other fancy boot
> loaders? Have you tried to reset the BIOS using the pin-hole
> behind the power button?....
>
> Phil.

Thanks for the reply, Phil.

But my machine does not even attempt to load an OS, so any hardware profiles
that Windows is aware of are irrelevant, and as it happens, I don't have
Windows on the machine.

Right now there's no hard drive in it at all, and I'm attempting to fiddle
with it while removing all the hardware I can get to.

Still no luck at all, so far.

It's got to be a bug in the BIOS, but the machine's over six years old. I
know IBM came out with a BIOS update for a ten year-old desktop machine I
once had, but I sure didn't expect it, and I'm not holding out much hope
that Lenovo would do anything about this.

Looks like I'll have to get a replacement system board... or security chip.

Chris

PS - Got to try the reset button, but I thought that was exactly that: a
reset button.

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Received on Fri Jan 5 22:03:47 2007