[ltp] X31 won't boot linux anymore

[Jonathan Byrne]

On Thursday 22 April 2004 03:46 pm, Brian Youngstrom wrote:

> I have an X31 sitting here that refuses to boot linux.  It worked great

Heheh, I have a 600X that does exactly the opposite: it will boot any Linux 
distro without issue (which is good, because that's my 99% OS on this 
machine) but will not boot any flavor of Windows, not from disk or from CD.  
It gets as far as the splash screen (where I suspect hardware probing is 
going on behind the scenes) and then hard-locks, requiring shutdown via the 
reset button.

I'm stumped too, except I can tell you one thing that seems somehow tied in 
with it:  for completely unrelated reasons I took the LCD assembly from that 
600X and put it on another one (faster, bigger disk, but the backlight had 
died) and that machine wouldn't boot Windows 2000 anymore, but Debian was 
fine.  That's how I discovered this problem.  Later, I put that LCD assembly 
back where it came from, and another assembly on the one that had had the bad 
backlight.  Then the one with the bad backlight was fine, and lo and behold, 
the original Thinkpad now would not boot Windows 98SE (but Debian was fine).

That's the point at which it dawned on me that something must be wrong with 
this LCD assembly.  Maybe the inverter, but I don't really know.

Now, IBM used two different suppliers for the LCDs on the 600 series, Samsung 
and LG.  I believe the two I have to be one of each, because the physical 
characteristics are so different.  One is flimsy and easily flexed, touching 
the back causes ripples in the LCD.  The other is like armor plate.  Based on 
my past experiences with LG equipment of other types, I suspect the one like 
armor plate is the Samsung.

The other characteristic that's different is the size of the characters that 
display the POST info is much larger on the one that I believe to be the 
Samsung and which is followed around by the "Windows won't boot" syndrome.

So far I haven't found anyone, not even among Thinkpad hardware gurus whose 
toolsets I am not worthy to carry, who has seen anything like this.  I'm 
stumped, too.

If I find an answer to this, I'll post it here, it might be related.  If you 
get one first, please do the same :-)

Cheers,

Jonathan
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