HELP: computer/laptop problem (from hell?), screen frozen at startup
 

Not sure where to turn...

When I try to turn on my IBM T23 Thinkpad running win2000 pro, it freezes at the initial startup screen. My power adapter is working/charging fine as is the internal fan.

At the bottom left corner of the frozen startup screen, it says:

Press F1 for IBM BIOS Setup Utility
Press F12 to choose temporary boot device

Right before the screen seems to freeze, the screen goes from full illumination to half illumination.

Usually, my OS loads right after this screen.

Before this happened, I was trying to set up a wireless home network and was installing the CDROM for the Netgear MA111 wireless USB adapter when my laptop's desktop crashed and I was given the choice of "restoring active desktop". I chose that, removed the Netgear CD from the drive, and then hit the restart button...which led to frozen start up screen.

After turning the computer on and off a few times...I noticed that when I press F1 and turn on the computer at the same time, I get the DOS BIOS screen. When I hit F12 and turn on the computer, I get the temporary boot device. Unfortunately, I have no idea what this all means.

I am hoping that even in a worst case scenario, I can recover the hard drive since it has all my work from the past year.

Thanks a lot in advance for any suggestions or referrals to computer technicians in the NYC area.

How old is your machine? Could be you need a new CMOS battery.

Can you boot from floppy or CD?

Sounds like you're never hitting the master boot record to boot windows.

You should be able to do a full system resore by hitting F11 (I think), though you will lose everything that you have installed, so I'd only do it as a last resort.

Sorry if this is all over the place. I'm doing it on the fly and obviously don;t have the machine in front of me.

Good luck!

Start with the most basic of things-

Is there a floppy or CD in the drives? If so remove them.

Do you have a bootable floppy disk? If so boot the machine and see if you can see the C drive.

If you can't then the hard drive is probably dead. If you can, then there is still hope.

thanks for the replies

Computer is maybe 2.0-2.5 years old (PIII-M/128MB RAM). It was a gift out of the box so I will need to track down the boot diskette, but I am already losing hope based on what I've read so far...this really stinks http://www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttr...orum/frown.gif

Guess it is time to find an authorized IBM technician

just can't believe that it was working fine one minute and then crashing the next

I've no experience with IBM machines, but my Toshiba had a similar problem before. I turned it on, it started, then the screen went blank and nothing happened. The OS wouldn't start.

By luck, I took the battery out, wait a couple of minutes and put it back in. Everything worked fine after that, as if nothing happened.

It's not the CMOS battery as in a basic mode on the IBM's (e.g clear'd CMOS) the IDE drive would be autodetected.

Did you have a bootable floppy you can put in? With this in, do you see a C: drive (is your Win2K drive formatted FAT or NTFS)??

Worst case, did you get a recovery CD from IBM. Will the system boot with that (even if you don't try to recover...) This would at least let you know if the hard drive is dead or something else is wrong.

I'm assuming this may still be under warranty by the way??

Do not give up hope!!

I had an IBM 600 PC that was running Windows NT, and when I tried to install a USB CD burner, it totally tripped and gave me the same symptom as yours.

I can't remember exactly what my tech guy did to fix it, but it was a simple fix and the PC was booting just fine within minutes.

On Windows 2000 there is a "recover to last known good configuration" option. Are you able to reach this option? If not there is a way to get to it.

Unfortunately I can't give you the specifics of my solution right away, but I'll look into my notes and see what I did to fix it.

However, do NOT prematurely wipe your hard drive or assume that all data is lost!!

This article might help:

http://www.netadmintools.com/art290.html

press "Space Bar" to invoke last known good configuration.

This assumes that the PC is able to boot from the HD of course.

http://www.winnetmag.com/Articles/In...leID=7494&pg=2

More good info...