[ltp] R40 Hangs during post cd detection and blinking caps lock

[Robert Svoboda]

* Kurt Humes <khumes86@yahoo.com> [2005-01-13 08:20]:
> I have a Thinkpad R40 Running Slackware 9.1.  It has a
> removable cdrw/dvd drive.  Last spring the system would hang
> during post while detecting the cd drive.  The laptop worked
> fine without it for a while but then I started getting bios
> error messages like system timer error.  I sent it back to
> IBM and they replaced the system board which fixed the
> problem.  But now it is happening again.  It no longer boots
> with the cd drive, I have not gotten the bios error messages
> yet but every once in a while the system will freeze and the
> caps lock led will start blinking.  Wondering if anyone has
> had similar problems or maybee something is not configured
> properly and is causing these problems.

Hi, 

I have the same machine and have exactly the same problem.
First, everything worked well, then after ~one month, booting
was sometimes painfully slow at cdrom detection followed by
very slow grub start. Then I saw some 3-4 lines of strange
messages while detecting hdc (cdrom). This was getting worse
so most of the time wasn't able to boot the machine with cdrom
plugged in.

I went to IBM service they replaced cdrom drive and everything
worked well again. Unfortunately this kind of behavior (very
slow grub start + strange lines while detecting hdc) started
appearing again very soon after replacement. But so far I
didn't experienced total machine hang so this is bearable.

It has been working for three weeks without problems.  So I'm
praying that it magically disappeared.

This is probably of no help for you, but I think it's almost
always better to not being alone in such situations :-)

Forgot to mention that I was searching the web while first
problems appeared and found some threads about similar
experiences. Unfortunately I don't have URLs.

Robert