x230 bricked after bios update? or hardware issues?

[bgravato]

Hi,

Sorry for the reposting... I meant to post this as new thread yesterday, but I posted on an old thread by accident...


I bought a x230 second hand on ebay (from UK) an year ago. 2x4GB ram (samsung), IPS screen, SSD, 9-cell battery, wifi, fingerprint reader, english keyboard.
I installed both linux and windows 7 on it. On windows, Lenovo's software kept bugging me about updating the bios, so I did (from Windows yes) it got bricked. It powered, power button light on, thinklight flashed once, fan spinned for a couple of seconds then stopped, black screen all the time, no image on external screen, etc... dead.
Not sure what the original bios version was.

Meanwhile I bought a few second hand motherboards. The first two I got I replaced them but still no luck... same symptoms.
The third motherboard I got worked and I got my x230 up and running again. I wiped the disk and installed Win7 and Linux again, though 99% of the time I'm using Linux.
BIOS version was 2.02 and EC 1.10.

I wanted to mod the bios to remove battery whitelist, but first I tried to update the bios with the original firmware to a more recent version... This time I played safe and decided to go with the bootable cd option... ("burning" it to an usb pen).
I also thought it would be a good idea to update one version at a time. I followed strickly the instructions on the txt file that comes with the bios update.

I downloaded the iso's from here: https://support.lenovo.com/pt/pt/downloads/ds029188
On linux, I used geteltorito to extract the image from the iso and "burned" it to USB with dd

I successfully updated from 2.02 to 2.06.
Then successfully update to 2.50, then 2.51, then 2.52, then 2.54.
All good up to this point. After each update I would reset bios to defaults (F9 on bios menu).
Then I decided to skip 2.55 update (it didn't change much) and go straight to 2.56 (changelog says it adds support for windows 8 ).

I booted from usb, run the the bios update, rebooted and BIOS flashing went through normally like the other times.
Then I got the "system will reboot in 5 seconds message" as usual, but when it restarted it didn't boot. Black screen, power button on, no reaction, the same I had an year ago with the "original" motherboard.

So I'm wondering if this might have been because I skipped the 2.55 update? Or maybe 2.56 and later versions introduce some change that is incompatible with my hardware, namely the IPS screen or the memory sticks?

If I remove both memory sticks and power on it starts beeping indicating a memory error as expected, so does that mean it's not completely bricked?

I tried removing the WIFI, fingerprint, etc boards, but it didn't make a difference. So if it's some hardware incompatibility with the bios I guess it must be either the screen, the RAM or the keyboard.

I also tried disconnecting the CMOS battery, but still no luck...

I don't know which BIOS version was on the motherboards I bought that didn't work, but maybe it was a more recent version and that's why they didn't work?

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

[Dudu2002]

Hi,

Sorry for the reposting... I meant to post this as new thread yesterday, but I posted on an old thread by accident...


I bought a x230 second hand on ebay (from UK) an year ago. 2x4GB ram (samsung), IPS screen, SSD, 9-cell battery, wifi, fingerprint reader, english keyboard.
I installed both linux and windows 7 on it. On windows, Lenovo's software kept bugging me about updating the bios, so I did (from Windows yes) it got bricked. It powered, power button light on, thinklight flashed once, fan spinned for a couple of seconds then stopped, black screen all the time, no image on external screen, etc... dead.
Not sure what the original bios version was.

Meanwhile I bought a few second hand motherboards. The first two I got I replaced them but still no luck... same symptoms.
The third motherboard I got worked and I got my x230 up and running again. I wiped the disk and installed Win7 and Linux again, though 99% of the time I'm using Linux.
BIOS version was 2.02 and EC 1.10.

I wanted to mod the bios to remove battery whitelist, but first I tried to update the bios with the original firmware to a more recent version... This time I played safe and decided to go with the bootable cd option... ("burning" it to an usb pen).
I also thought it would be a good idea to update one version at a time. I followed strickly the instructions on the txt file that comes with the bios update.

I downloaded the iso's from here: https://support.lenovo.com/pt/pt/downloads/ds029188
On linux, I used geteltorito to extract the image from the iso and "burned" it to USB with dd

I successfully updated from 2.02 to 2.06.
Then successfully update to 2.50, then 2.51, then 2.52, then 2.54.
All good up to this point. After each update I would reset bios to defaults (F9 on bios menu).
Then I decided to skip 2.55 update (it didn't change much) and go straight to 2.56 (changelog says it adds support for windows 8 ).

I booted from usb, run the the bios update, rebooted and BIOS flashing went through normally like the other times.
Then I got the "system will reboot in 5 seconds message" as usual, but when it restarted it didn't boot. Black screen, power button on, no reaction, the same I had an year ago with the "original" motherboard.

So I'm wondering if this might have been because I skipped the 2.55 update? Or maybe 2.56 and later versions introduce some change that is incompatible with my hardware, namely the IPS screen or the memory sticks?

If I remove both memory sticks and power on it starts beeping indicating a memory error as expected, so does that mean it's not completely bricked?

I tried removing the WIFI, fingerprint, etc boards, but it didn't make a difference. So if it's some hardware incompatibility with the bios I guess it must be either the screen, the RAM or the keyboard.

I also tried disconnecting the CMOS battery, but still no luck...

I don't know which BIOS version was on the motherboards I bought that didn't work, but maybe it was a more recent version and that's why they didn't work?

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Hi
You have already received an answer
https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-x...#pid147476