Spent 4 hours fixing a boot loop on a free ThinkPad I got from Craigslist

Picked up a T430 for free last week, guy said it wouldn't turn on. Turned out it was stuck in a boot loop from a bad RAM stick I didn't think to check first. Tried swapping the hard drive, reseating the keyboard, even pulled the CMOS battery before I finally just tried one stick at a time. Anyone else waste a whole afternoon on something that simple?

3 comments

3 Comments

brianreed20d ago

And that's exactly the thing, karenb97 is right. Those "waste of time" hours are the ones that actually teach you how to diagnose instead of just guessing. Like, I spent a whole day on a desktop once where it would turn on for a split second then die, and I must have swapped every part except the power supply. Finally just plugged a different one in and it booted right up. Now anytime a machine acts weird like that, I don't even touch the guts until I've checked the power supply first. That's the kind of shortcut you only get by taking the long way around. You'll probably laugh about this T430 in a month when you can spot a bad RAM stick just by the way the fan spins up.

karenb9724d ago

Wait, you're calling 4 hours a waste? That's how you learn stuff for real. I spent a whole Saturday once on a Dell that wouldn't POST, turned out to be a bent pin in the CPU socket. Nobody taught me that, I just had to stare at it long enough. You probably know way more about boot loops now than you did before, plus you'll never skip the RAM test again. That's not wasted time, that's paid tuition in the school of hardware repair. Next time you'll fix it in 20 minutes flat, and that's only because you took the long way this time.

fiona_kim24d ago

Honestly this is so true. That feeling when you finally spot the thing you missed is brutal but it sticks with you forever. Tbh those 4 hour sessions are what turn you into the person who can fix it in 20 minutes later.