I've been working on an IBM Thinkpad R40 Laptop for a few days now. A
client brought it in because he always received the message "No
Operating System Found." I tried the hard drive in another IBM laptop
and in multiple desktops as slave, master, and stand-alone and finally
had to mark the hdd as completely dead. A slight movement of the hdd
would result in a rattling sound. I purchased a new hdd and put it in
the laptop and found that the cdrom drive was also defective... I could
not boot from the cdrom drive to install Windows. So I put the hdd in
another Thinkpad since they had similar hardware and installed Windows.
Then I swapped the hdd back to the R40 and booted Windows and
installed updates. I found that even when inside Windows that Explorer
did not recognize the cdrom drive. I swapped the drive with a known
good one and the same result. After working on the laptop for a few
hours, I found that at times Windows would recognize the cdrom drive,
but that the drive would disappear from Explorer when trying to access
a file on the drive. So I came to the conclusion that the drive was
fine, but it may have been a motherboard problem. I noticed that BIOS
did not recognize the drive either and unfortunately there is no Auto
Detect option for drives in the IBM BIOS. Another note is that at
times it would take 5 minutes to get into BIOS after pressing F1 and
sometimes it would hang for a few minutes at the POST screen (but after
POST) until it booted Windows... not all the time though. All of this
made a logical deduction that the CMOS data stored was faulty, which I
would naturally reset by removing the CMOS battery for a few minutes.
I did this and put the battery back in and now the laptop just boots to
a black screen. The CPU fan spins for about three seconds and stops.
I tested the battery with a DMM and it has 3.09 volts across it. Any
ideas???
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