My T400 laptop restarts each 5 seconds

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Majin Buu
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Iscritto: 11/05/2016

Hello to the Trisquel community. Months ago, I saved money and bought a T400 laptop from Technoethicaland it worked better than I expected.

Nevertheless, a few weeks ago, I was studying with it but battery was running out, so I decided to suspend it. Many days after that, I plugged the adapter and I tried to turn the laptop on, but it started to do something very rare...

It turned on and five seconds later it turned off automatically. Five seconds after that it turned on again, all of that without my intervention. When this happens, the battery icon flickers and a circle with a kind of "Z" is on too.

I restarted the BIOS (Libreboot) by removing the NVRAM battery for 20 minutes but it didn't work. I was searching for T400 manuals. The only thing useful that I found is the hardware maintenance manual, but I didn't find anything useful there.

I would be very grateful if someone who had the same problem than me could tell me where can I find the solution.

Regards

chaosmonk

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I am a translator!

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Iscritto: 07/07/2017

> I plugged the
> adapter and I tried to turn the laptop on

Have you tried taking the battery out, plugging the laptop in, and powering the laptop on *without* putting the battery back in?

Majin Buu
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Iscritto: 11/05/2016

Yes, many times...

Thank you for answering.

SuperTramp83

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Iscritto: 10/31/2014

dangit, I always first browse the Spanish foro **before** viewing the English one.. Ignore my dumb abbreviated translation, just wanted to spread your request so to enlarge the chances of a useful answer.. cheers

dani77
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Iscritto: 06/09/2018

Hello,

did you tried to contact Technoethical for help?
Maybe they know how to fix that or have some idea of whatś happening with your laptop.

Regards

pehjota
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Iscritto: 02/09/2013

> It turned on and five seconds later it turned off automatically.

Did the screen backlight turn on at any point in those five seconds before the laptop turned off?

If not, from your description it sounds like you're in a "reset loop" in the RAM initialization stage. The firmware tries to initialize your RAM, fails for some reason, and resets (reboots) to try again from scratch. If it's never able to initialize the RAM correctly, it will turn off and back on forever.

Resuming from suspend-to-RAM could theoretically trigger such an infinite reset loop, but I've only ever seen it when I modified the order in which coreboot clears the resume flag and initializes RAM. The way the firmware works normally, resuming from suspend should only affect the first RAM initialization attempt. So I think there may be another cause here.

I would first suggest checking your memory modules to make sure they match in density and such (the easiest thing to check is the RAM part numbers). Since you've already tried disconnecting the NVRAM/RTC battery, I guess you know how to get to the RAM slots right next to it.

Technoethical

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Iscritto: 08/15/2014

Thanks everyone for trying to help. We were not aware of the problem our customer was facing, nor of the discussion started here, but our customer has also contacted us directly afterwards. We'll make sure to post here the solution.

Majin Buu
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Iscritto: 11/05/2016

I've just solved the problem! Happened that RAM modules were bad placed, so I removed and putted them again and my laptop worked again. Thanks to everybody that answered!