Hi guys,

My Lenovo T410 is refusing to boot up. Battery is fine as same issues from battery as AC.

Popped out both RAM chips and get a 1-3-3-1 beep sequence which seems to suggest RAM or mainboard is fubar.

This is the limit of my tech skills. Is the 1331 sequence just telling me to put the RAM back in or is it useful?
With both RAM back seated I press power and comes on starts to boot then powers off immediately.

Any help would be great
Thanks

Chris

Motherboard doesn’t seem fubar’d as messed with RAM and managed to get it to boot up. Fingers crossed it stays that way. 😀

p.s. do you ever get the feeling that you’re having a conversation with yourself? 🙄

If you get error beeps without RAM motherboard is most likely fine.
How far in the boot up did it get when not working?

Try without the battery in and just connected to the AC power as well if it happens again, it can be the battery but the fact taking memory out and putting it back in have fixed it best guess is that the memory was loose.

I used to work for IBM fixing their laptops when Lenovo bought them and continued to do so for a while after.

Thanks Mikkel. Yes, booting up fine now so suggests a RAM issue.

Had gone to lengths of buying a new battery so that’s working fine. Out of interest I also disconnected the little round battery under the keyboard (CMOS?) as had found some posts regarding this and pressing the power button 10 times with a 30sec long hold. All sounded mumbo-jumbo but at least it’s working now!

Cheers

taking battery out, disconnecting the AC adapter and then pressing the start button for 30 sec have fixed many a laptop they ears i worked there 🙂
Its a good place to start

There’s a utility you can run called memtest which could help identify bad ram.. Also you could try with just one stick of ram in, and alternate them to isolate a faulty stick.

The cmos (bios) battery can result in some pretty weird stability issues if it’s starting to fail.. New ones are about £2-4. Removing the cmos battery, and Mains and main battery will reset and clear the bios so it can’t hurt to do that as part of your troubleshooting. A bad cmos battery usually is accompanied by the operating system failing to maintain the correct time on its clock though.

But if it’s working now, I wouldn’t worry but the above may help if it starts playing up again.

Just to add, if you experiment with running only one stick of ram, the single stick will need to be in the primary ram socket, if it’s in the secondary slot with the first slot empty, the bios may just think there’s no ram plugged in at all.

There are website that explain what the beep sequence means but it varies according to what bios you are running, at a guess it was beeping at you because there was no ram installed, or the ram is faulty.

Mattyfez – it’s on the blink again. Any advice as to procedure to get it alive again?

Try cleaning the contacts on the RAM sticks? You can get proper cleaning fluids, I suspect brake cleaner will work if you’re careful, but I hear a rubber works just as well.

If you’re playing around with the RAM, make sure you’re clipping it in properly each time, some laptops are a bugger to get seated correctly.