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    Wed, 19 Aug 2009

    /xHW/Thinkpad_a21m: Motherboard is Dying

    In recent days this poor suffering Thinkpad a21m (running pretty much all day, every day for the past four years) has taken to locking-up periodically, and then sometimes refusing to start afterwards. When it does the latter, it cannot seem to find the hardrive. However, swapping in a second hardrive brings no improvement. This behavior really resembles a fan / overheating problem. However, I can sometimes clearly hear the fan on, and what I can see from periodically monitoring the temperature would indicate this is not a temperature problem. I even went to the trouble of disassembling the whole machine and physically examining the fan. I also found a software means of forcing the fan to run continuously at high speed. All to no avail, the machine still dies.

    Conclusion: motherboard is toast. Which on such an old (PIII 800 MHz) machine means retirement, as the cost of a whole new machine of similar vintage (just over US$100 in a local market) would be not a lot more then the cost of another motherboard. Time to go shopping....

    For posterity, I will record how I went about controlling the fan, per this fine document[1], using kernel 2.6.30:

    Unload the relevant module should it already be loaded:

    rmmod thinkpad-acpi
    Now reload the module with fan control turned on:
    modprobe thinkpad-acpi fan_control=1
    Inspect the state of the fan controls thusly:
    cat /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
    And crank up the fan to full speed:
    echo level full-speed > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan

    You should get instant auditory feedback from the last action. At least on an a21m, full speed is REALLY LOUD. I have never heard it run that hard in all the years I have owned the machine, so fearing for the safety of the fan I toned the speed down to level 7. Still loud, but not outrageously so.

    [1] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_control_fan_speed

    posted at: 12:18 | path: /xHW/Thinkpad_a21m | permanent link to this entry